Heidegger's Critique Research Articles

{Le Théâtre de la Cruauté} or When Caring ‘Is’

In this article we offer an ontological theorization of care. The article interrogates the self-evident quality of everyday meanings for ‘care’ that might be generated from psychological or biological discourses; we aim to question the way that ‘care’ is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of early childhood education. The article works towards offering a new theorization that does not treat the meaning of ‘care’ as self-evident. If ‘care’ is a way of addressing concern for ourselves as human beings, we think that deepening the theoretical parameters of this concept will add to how we understand the complexity of gender and race relations. By articulating Heidegger’s use of ‘care’ and comparing it to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger’s work on this concept, we hope to enable professionals and families to view conceptions of ‘care’ outside the familiar definitions applied in everyday discourse. The article treats early childhood education professional practice as an instance of how both gender and race delimit the way in which human relationships can be understood.

Harnessing Our Very Life

The Aristotelian ideas of nature (physis) and technology (techné) are taken as a starting point for understanding what it would mean for technology to be truly living. Heidegger's critique of the conflation of scientific and technological thinking in the current era is accepted as demonstrating that humanity does not have a deep enough appreciation of the nature of life to harness its essence safely. Could the vision of harnessing life be realized, which we strongly doubt, living technology would give selected humans transforming powers that could be expected to exacerbate, rather than solve, current global problems. The source of human purposefulness, and hence of both technology and ethics, is identified in nature's emergent capability to instantiate informational representations in material forms. Ethics that are properly grounded in an appreciation of intrinsic value, especially that of life, demand that proposals to give humanity the capabilities of living technology address the social, political, economic, and environmental problems inherent in its development and potential deployment. Before any development is embarked on, steps must be taken to avoid living technology, whatever the term eventually designates, becoming available for destructive or antisocial purposes such as those that might devastate humanity or irrevocably damage the natural world.

Imagining Postscience: Heidegger and Development Communication

Modernization, the dominant contemporary model of development, has technoscientific rationality as its base. Alternatively, development can be understood as the ascent of individuals and communities toward their own conceptions of the good life. Such an understanding of development, it is argued, cannot be communicated under technoscientific assumptions. Instead, under the light of Heidegger's critique of technoscience and his philosophy of communication, a postscientific perspective is invoked for communicating development as good life, less violent to human communities and the environment, and less monolithic in design. Postscience evokes the multiplicity of ways in which we seek credibility for our projects in opposition to the monistic conception of truth and meaning in the technoscientific paradigm. Exploiting Heidegger's understanding of the world-disclosive power of language, development communication is understood as disclosing the genuine possibilities for the good life, concealed in a people's world, in an authentic act of engagement between the people and the communicator of development.

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

Beyond skills: embodying writerly practices through the doctorate

This article explores the features and potential of an embodied, rather than merely skills-based, approach to doctoral writing. The authors’ conceptual framework is derived from the phenomenological literature, particularly Heidegger's critique of modern life as permeated by a quest for mastery and control. They address two key questions with respect to this: Firstly, what role might the quest for mastery as achieving command or control play in impeding writing and undermining an embodied writerly practice? Secondly, to what extent might narrow skills-based approaches to writing unwittingly promote the quest for mastery and therefore encourage, rather than diminish, the anxieties that doctoral research writers may feel?

Comment on Ralph Hancock, The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age

Ralph Hancock's Responsibility of Reason distinguishes two “axes of transcendence,” vertical and horizontal, characteristic of ancient and modern philosophy, respectively, and settles for a mixed regime in which both can stake their claim. Praising Tocqueville and Heidegger for their trenchant analyses of the modern problem, Hancock criticizes the effort by Leo Strauss and his “High Straussian” disciples to restore classical political philosophy as post-Christian, that is, denying rather than acknowledging Christian insight. Regarding Strauss, I think the criticism misfires, for Strauss's adage to understand authors as they understood themselves allows Christianity, too, to appear as fresh as the classical authors to whom the early Christians responded. Moreover, to settle the responsibility of reason in our time requires coming to terms with the achievements as well as the limits of modern science, the epitome of reason to most modern men. Heidegger's critique of technology does not exhaust this responsibility, nor ensure that political liberty can be recovered in its wake.

Heidegger's figures

This essay argues that Heidegger's critique of metaphor and figurative language, both within philosophical idiom and the reading of poetry, constitutes an original and far-reaching contribution to this issue. In particular, it focuses on Heidegger's insistence that the import of metaphor for philosophy and poetry lies in its structural dependence, as meta-pherein or Über-tragung (carrying-over), on the dualism between sensuous and nonsensuous realms. In this, the critique opens on to a far more developed thinking on the relation between bodily experience and linguistic cognition, and in particular an attempt to think of the body as a site for an ‘articulation’ of language anterior to any opposition of sound and sense. It is in order to think that by this bodily articulation of language the question of ‘poetic’ figure becomes particularly crucial for Heidegger, and the article ends by suggesting directions for us to take Heidegger's insights into poetic figure that would reach beyond the confines of Heidegger's own work.

Enframing geography: subject, curriculum, knowledge, responsibility

The word ‘geo-graphy’ means ‘writing the earth’. The subject of geography bears responsibility for engaging, constituting and configuring world knowledge, in other words, what the world is. This paper describes an enquiry into the nature of school geographical knowledge at a time of curriculum policy reform. In 2010, the newly appointed Coalition government in Britain introduced the concept of core knowledge for the school curriculum. Some of the problems associated with core knowledge are illustrated by showing two alternative ways of knowing the world that core knowledge overlooks. To understand the nature of the constitution of knowledge, I turn to Heidegger. His idea of Enframing explains the emergence of meaning about the world within the constraints of a technical scheme that conceals as much as it reveals. A second idea of Heidegger's, the event of appropriation, suggests how meaning comes into being through the ‘belonging together’ of humans and the world. This belonging together takes us away from representational thinking into the realm of a more original and authentic sense of what is. Although this appears to provide a very credible argument about world meaning-making, it is superseded by Derrida's critique of Heidegger as someone who claims to deconstruct the history of ontology at the same time as retaining a commitment to it. Derrida's différance advances Heidegger's work into a consideration of meaning and justice. The associated deconstructive attitude takes responsibility seriously by disrupting taken-for-granted meanings and conceptual schemes and opening them up to see what other groups of people or ways of knowing might be overlooked.

Spectral Machinery (or Beyond Essence and System)

The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler's critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls 'synthetic worlds' (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular 'fantasy of disembodiment' that shapes a user's experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware.

Miejsce fenomenu śmierci w ontologii fundamentalnej Martina Heideggera

The text begins with an introduction that sketches the philosophical and cultural context of Being and Time which is followed by three parts. In the fi rst part theauthor explains the reasons why Heidegger’s analysis of human existence, which he calls a “hermeneutics of facticity”, developed into fundamental ontology. In the second part the author discovers an ontological description of death, as contained in this book, which is fundamentally different from any ontic description of this phenomenon. The last part contains the conclusions: 1. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology opens up a new chapter in the history of Western philosophy; it is an original project of a hermeneutic phenomenology; 2. the experience of death belongs, according to Heidegger, to the transcendental structure of a human being. Levinas’s and Sartre’s critique of Heidegger’s description of death is invalid because Heidegger does not describe bodily experience and pain, which accompany the process of dying, but rather the consciousness of being mortal that conditions people’s existential projects. This constitutes a deeper sense of his analyses.

Dwelling In the House that Porn Built

This paper is a critique of pornography from within the framework of Heideggerian phenomenology. I contend that pornography is a pernicious form of technological discourse in which women are reduced to spectral and anonymous figures fulfilling a universal role, namely that of sexual subordination. Further, the danger of pornography is covered over in the public sphere as a result of the pervasive appeal to its status as mere fantasy. I argue that relegating the problem to the domain of fantasy is superficial and specious at best, inasmuch as fantasy itself is ultimately grounded in everyday reality. When not concealed as innocu- ous fantasy, pornography has been defended under the rubric of free speech. One of my aims is to repudiate this approach by revealing it as grounded in a highly suspect and self-contradictory phallocentric view of language. Rae Langton's (2009) recently published collection of essays on pornography attacks the problem largely in terms of objectification and the Austinian notion of illocutionary disablement from a position of authority. In this paper, I too confront the issues of language, objectification, and authority, but as articulated by means of Heidegger's critique of technology.

GADAMER AND COLLINGWOOD ON TEMPORAL DISTANCE AND UNDERSTANDING

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we begin by suggesting an intuitive model of time embodying a notion of temporal distance that we claim is at work in Gadamer's hermeneutics, while it is rejected in Collingwood's theory of interpretation. To show this, after a brief review of the influence of Collingwood on Gadamer and of their disagreement over the possibility of recovering an author's intention, we examine in turn their answers to the problem of transposition, upon which the philosophy of Dilthey supposedly foundered. We show that Gadamer embraced the idea of temporal distance in his solution, which consisted in claiming that the distance between an author from the past and us is filled in by tradition, which opens access to the text for us, while Collingwood considered explanations of the actions of historical agents, and by extension understanding of a text, in intentional or rational terms. Furthermore, he thought that such explanations are not causal, and that the thoughts involved in them do not stand within the flow of physical time, which is involved in any notion of temporal distance. This is why Collingwood felt entitled to anti‐relativistic conclusions about the recovery of authorial intentions, conclusions that prompted Gadamer to claim that “the dimension of hermeneutical mediation which is passed through in every act of understanding” escaped him. We then discuss the underlying notions of time at work in both Gadamer and Collingwood, showing that Ricœur had a better appreciation of the issue, since he saw that Collingwood's moves parallel, up to a point, Heidegger's critique of “vulgar time,” albeit with an entirely different result. We also point to the importance in Collingwood's thinking of his notion of “incapsulation.”

Heidegger among dryads: on the origin of the female work of art

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine a lacuna in Heidegger's “The Origin of the Work of Art”, that is, that it does not consider that such “origin” might be gendered. Originally published in a collection entitled Holzwege, which in the Cambridge (2002) edition is translated as Off the Beaten Track, Heidegger explains, “Wood” is an old name for the forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are “Holzwege”.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is written within a philosophical tradition and seeks to examine Derrida's lengthy deconstruction of Heidegger's essay and Irigaray's elegant gender critique, which are among works attesting to the importance and controversy The Origin has provoked among post‐structuralist thinkers.FindingsThe paper considers The Origin as an auto‐deconstructive text, through which other voices (one, or more, not Heidegger's) are heard; voices calling him, through him, as him; which he cannot identify or silence. They disrupt and confound his thinking and writing; he tries (unsuccessfully) to mend the discrepancies, assuage the violence, but ultimately leaves the essay in limbo, intuiting something even he cannot comprehend, an alien writing, that its internal contradictions be reserved for others to puzzle over.Originality/valueThe paper offers a reading of The Origin against the Classical male hegemony excluding women from their proper participation in architecture, art in general, aesthetic hermeneutics and philosophy of art. These circuits of exclusion being integral to the phallocentric orthodoxy inherited from the Ancient Greeks.

Location-based services: transformation of the experience of space

This article argues that location-based services (LBS) like the social network-based LBS Foursquare are playing an active role in the transformation of experience of the world for users. Based on Heidegger's critique of modern technology and view of technology as a modern ontotheology, and using quantitative and qualitative analyses, this article argues that the importance and role of mobile computational devices and LBS is shifting users’ views of physical space by providing social and semantic cues for navigating the world via mobile devices and LBS. This movement is based on users accessing and interacting with maps, making them meaningful through social gazetteers and part of a socially based referential totality, which while liberating has consequences for how users perceive other users and entities in the world, along with problematising current key issues like privacy.

ERNST VON GLASERSFELD'S RADICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM AND TRUTH AS DISCLOSURE

In this essay Clarence Joldersma explores radical constructivism through the work of its most well‐known advocate, Ernst von Glasersfeld, who combines a sophisticated philosophical discussion of knowledge and truth with educational practices. Joldersma uses Joseph Rouse's work in philosophy of science to criticize the antirealism inherent in radical constructivism, emphasizing that Rouse's Heideggerian critique differs from the standard realist defense of modernist epistemology. Next, Joldersma develops an alternative conception of truth, in terms of disclosure, based on Lambert Zuidervaart's work in aesthetics. Joldersma concludes by arguing that this notion of truth avoids the pitfalls of both realism and antirealism, giving educational theorists a way forward to accept some of the major insights of constructivism with respect to learning and teaching without having to relinquish a robust notion of truth.

Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche*

This paper examines Charles Taylor's case against complete secularization in A Secular Age in the light of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of the potential for nihilism inherent in different kinds of philosophical appeals to “transcendence”. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as ontotheology suggests that the theoretical pluralism Taylor rightly embraces is more consistently thought of as following from a robust ontological pluralism, and that Taylor's own commitment to ontological monism seems to follow from his own desire to leave room in his theoretical account for an ontotheological creator God who stands outside the world and ultimately unifies its meaning. The Nietzschean critique contends that any such appeal to something that transcends the limits of human finitude remains nihilistic, insofar as such valorizations of the otherworldly undermine our capacity to appreciate and experience the genuine meaningfulness of human existence in its this-worldly finitude. The paper explores Taylor's response to this Nietzschean critique, showing that Taylor “deconstructs” the crucial distinction between immanence and transcendence that any “exclusively humanist” worldview must presuppose. Taylor's response only partly resolves the problem, however, because the Nietzschean can still draw a defensible distinction between legitimate and meaningful appeals to transcendence and illegitimate and nihilistic ones. The paper concludes by suggesting that traditional appeals to a transcendent creator God, a heavenly afterlife, and so on, continue to run afoul of Nietzsche's critique of the nihilism of otherworldliness, and that we would do better to explicitly abjure such otherworldly appeals.

Opposing Political Philosophy and Literature: Strauss's Critique of Heidegger and the Fate of the 'Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry'

Opposing Political Philosophy and Literature: Strauss's Critique of Heidegger and the Fate of the 'Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry'

Foundational History

History and theory often become disconnected from the studio sequence and isolated within the larger scope of a young designer's education. In this article, I discuss the development of a design foundation course that provides beginning students experience with history, theory, and design, treated not as individual topics, but as interrelated activities. The course is grounded in Martin Heidegger's critique of Western thought's isolating tendencies, and his development of a foundational concept of history, in which it is not the objects of history that matter but the relationships and interactions that occur between them that are truly instructive and enlightening.

Caring for the World

In the twentieth century, the concept of the will appears in bad daylight. Martin Heideg-ger for instance criticizes the will as a movement of reducing otherness to sameness, dif-ference to identity. Since his diagnosis of the will, the releasement from a wilful manner of thinking and the exploration of the possibility of non-willing has become a prevalent issue in contemporary philosophy. This article questions whether this quietism is still possible in our times, were we are confronted with climate change and the future of mankind is fundamentally threatened. On the one hand, the human will to 'master‘ and 'exploit‘ the natural world can be seen as the root of the ecological crisis, as Heidegger observed. On the other hand, its current urgency forces us to evaluate the releasement of the will in contemporary philosophy. Because also Heidegger himself attempted to develop a proper concept of the will in the onset of the thirties, we start our inquiry with Heidegger‘s phenomenology of the will in the thirties. Although Heidegger was very critical about the concept of the will later on, we are not inclined to reject the concept of the will as he did eventually. In this article we show that Heidegger's criticism of the will is not phenomenologically motivated, and we will develop a proper post-Heideggerian concept of willing. Finally the question will be answerd whether this proper concept of willing can help us to find a solution for the ecological crisis.

On the Question of Being: A Thomistic Response to Martin Heidegger’s Critique Against Western Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger announces that the entire Western metaphysics is an onto- theology, which means that it has failed to authentically raise the question of Being. This criticism is extended to the Christian philosophy of the Scholastics whose essence-existence distinction has further aggravated, rather than helped to solve, the problem. The aim of this paper is to articulate a reply on behalf of Aquinas' metaphysics against this Heideggerian critique. It will argue that the latter's philosophy of Esse and his understanding of the human person as created in the image and likeness of God (Imago Dei), which allows him to treat the human person as a creature situated in the world and is thereby in constant search for the meaning of his earthly and limited existence, could support a Thomistic apologetic versus the Heideggerian critique. This paper will posit that in the philosophy of Aquinas, the call for an authentic existence is imperative to a being whose very existence is defined by his vocation to return to his Maker. Hence, every exercise of human freedom (which should be responsive to God's plan for the world) is an encounter with Being; that is, the rational and free creature raises the question of Being as s/he tries to make sense of his/her finite existence in the world. Rather than viewing Aquinas' Christian philosophy as pseudo-thinking (as Heidegger claims), this paper will conclude that Aquinas' view on freedom is rather an articulation of that human pilgrimage from and back to the Creator. Aquinas then is very much aware that the human person needs to make concrete decisions in the world, thereby necessitating his/ her encounter with Being.