Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_yd3q1b in philosophy
But there is a whole culture of fetishism around these objects, I'm guilty of it myself. Perhaps the people who celebrate the airplane as an object are on the outside so to speak, not the ones operating or purchasing them though.
That's an interesting point. I think it might be because it is also a certain conquering of nature, an impressive scientific accomplishment of physics make an iron bird fly. I think telescopes, missions to the moon and certain other technological projects in the name of discovery or merely accomplishments (e.g. the space race) can maybe not be as accurately described by this and provide a different category of technology all together. Heidegger, in his "the question concerning technology" talks about demanding resources from nature, but I do not see how a telescope is demanding anything.
The telescope is demanding spectral and electromagnetic information from the cosmos
It also demands the materials used to build the telescope, literally
To think he didn't live to see the the catastrophe that is social media. The platform it gives to idiots and the echo chamber of contracting world views and the abandonment of truth in favour of opinion. He must be spinning in his grave.
I mean he was a literal Nazi, I hope the only thing he's doing in his grave is miserably rotting in it.
Yeah and his journal entries reveal he wasn't just a Nazi because the Nazis were in power and it was required to be a member of the party in his academic position, but a true adherent and horrendously anti semetic.
It's possible that this opinion about social media is shared by many, many more people than one might expect. We only hear from the humans who use it. Maybe a mass exodus from social media is in our best interest. Including from Reddit.
I disagree. A plane is still just a plane, a physical object in the physical world. It's not a "blur" of potential. This might be coming from the fact that people are "living" more of their lives in the "digital world" which isn't really the "digital world" it's the normal world while using the internet.
Immanence?
I think 9/11 showed us a plane is more than „it’s potential to transport people“. It’s never that simple.
Well that automatically brings capitalism into the picture if you want to answer any of those questions. The plane is owned by people who only have 1 purpose for owning that plane, if we were to use it for anything else we would be breaking the law
I find it interesting that people are so quick to correlate capitalism with any form of thinking based on maximizing utility, all economic systems do this to varying degrees of efficiency. A communist system would not build aircraft for any reason other than to move things. I understand that the discussion here is about paradigms of thought and certainly the capitalist mindset does encourage this sort of thinking, but it is present in any large scale human organizational structure to some degree, and more telling of our state of industrial/technological civilization, rather than a direct relationship to economic systems, if the two can be separated.
Just as a side story, I once saw someone say that Uber was terrible and exploitative and wouldn't exist under socialism. So I asked if any form of taxis would exist under socialism. They said: of course not! I asked why that would be, and they said: well because there would be no cars of course!
So anyways, according to that guy, I'm guessing there wouldn't be any airplanes under socialism as well, lol
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This subreddit is really really really anti-capitalist. If you push back even the slightest on any kind of critique related to capitalism here you will get swamped with downvotes.
I would argue that this kind of anti-capitalist mentality is the root of many deranged philosophies.
most critiques either use strawmen (most people cant define terms like capitalism or communism) or end up asking for an entire dissertation on an alternative system.
i would argue the blind devotion to capitalism most people show is it self deranged.
and i say that as someone who doesnt like any system (nothing we have invented is fit for purpose, we need a new ideology not rehashed 200+ year old ones).
> i would argue the blind devotion to capitalism most people show is it self deranged.
I’m talking about the world of philosophy though. Yeah, most laymen have a pretty poor understanding of capitalism and simply support it blindly, but people who study philosophy should know better than to be so rabidly anti-capitalist/anti-liberal.
I think a lot of people get very frustrated at those of us who defend liberalism because it’s just so easy to imagine a world that is better than the one we inhabit. And they’re frustrated that we seem to be “blocking” them from making that fantasy a reality. But the more wizened among us should know to urge great caution in pursuing these fantasies.
Do you think the level of broad discussion of "utopian" ideas/goals/etc is too little, too much, or just about right?
Not sure if it does, nor does Heidegger himself ever suggest it, this essence of technology could be present in, and I think could be argued to have been, present in all industrialized nations, regardless of what economic system they used, at the time of Heidegger's writing.
I’m probably taking it too literal then, capitalism does what Heidegger was talking about in an incredibly literal way, but deeper than that it is true that we have some shit going on with that also
Heidegger isn't always consistent as a person. I agree that there is an inherent critique of capitalism in his works more broadly, especially in his critique of emerging technology (which to me feels compatible with Marx), but the guy was also a Nazi. He asks interesting questions and makes interesting observations, but it's like none of that informed his life.
Criticism of capitalism is very compatible with Nazi ideology
Okay I'll bite. What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?
Doesn't look like the poster is going to answer, but such people forget how ruthlessly anti-Communist the Nazis were. From the beginning of Hitler's power, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, was appointed to hunt and imprison Communists. That was soon changed to include Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and whoever else the Nazis declared an enemy. Nazis have nothing to do with leftist international socialism. A lot of Americans are too dense to appreciate the difference and see the word "socialist" and go crazy.
Exactly, and the same misunderstanding is happening again now with regards to Russia and the anticommunism of Putin.
One can be anti-Communist and anti-Capitalist at the same time. Communists do not hold a monopoly over criticism of capitalism.
>What's the Nazi critique of capitalism?
I think they were upset about their belief that Jews were running it?
Sure, but that's not a critique of capitalism, that's just anti-semitism. They purged the Jews and ran a hypercapitalist society that was backed by capitalists around the world. Meanwhile they also purged the socialists and communists (to them a Jew, a "cultural Bolshevik", and a communist were all the same thing).
Meanwhile, Heidegger's philosophy contains elements that are inherently critical of capitalism, though it's never explicit.
Yeah I'm not the person who you replied to. Sorry I was just being facetious.
Haha, yeah I figured as much. It's really hard to claim that fascism is critical of capitalism in any imaginable way.
Intertwined in the antisemitism and what made it so attractive to the antisemetic people was that they could put the failings of capitalism onto Jewish people.
Well, once you prohibit a class of people from participating in a marketplace, you're not practicing capitalism anymore. You're not letting the marketplace decide the efficient owners of capital.
So Naziism is, by definition, a critique of capitalism.
The "marketplace" isn't a person who decides things. It's just whoever controls the market. Whether it's a cabal of wealthy billionaires or the state, it doesn't really matter.
In the end, all capitalism is, is a system that separates people into employers and employees. You got that and you got some form of capitalism.
So did Communism under Lenin, under Mao, and under Castro, so that's just not a useful definition.
You should actually read some Adam Smith. You might learn something.
Yeah none of them achieved a socialist economy.
Edit: Also, Smith wrote before the word capitalism even appeared.
So capitalism is something we define only by how it's practiced, but socialism and communism are only defined by theory, and any attempted implementations should be called something else if they don't conform to theory?
Am I understanding you correctly?
And Smith is called the father of capitalism. His works are the foundation for the theory of capitalism, every bit as much as Marx is for communism. Just because the term for Smith's new system wasn't used in English until the 1850s doesn't change the historical lineage of that system.
Nobody but Stalin claimed achieving socialism, and you can believe him if you'd like I guess.
Smith was describing, not prescribing, economics. Maybe you should read him?
dont bite, he's a troll
Ever heard of Strasserism? Just because they were pushed out for practical reasons does not mean Nazi ideology and criticism of capitalism are incompatible. Also, I understand that capitalists want Nazis to have been socialists, and communists want them to have been capitalists, Ludwig von Mises in this essay (https://mises.org/library/planned-chaos) lays out their system in a way that does not seem entirely capitalist or socialistic, almost like a “third position”.
I mean there's a ton of nonsense ideologies out there, and the fact that the Nazis were calling themselves "national socialists" in opposition to the "international socialists" (who were the actual socialists the Nazis purged after coming into power) is certainly going to aid in that confusion.
Western capitalists very specifically funded the Nazis to fight against the communists / socialists to the East. It wasn't until the Nazis invaded to the West that this changed. Fascism is the attack dog of capitalism, not a capitalist led transition into socialism (which makes no sense at all).
The communists didn't want Nazis to be capitalists, either. In fact, after the Soviet Revolution, it was hoped that Germany would have a socialist revolution. It went the opposite way, and this spelled disaster for socialism in Russia. It was one of the reasons for the disorder in the USSR; they had to rely on their own feudal lords to run a presumably socialist economy.
As for the article, it's very long and I'll have to check it out later. Keep in mind, though, that capitalism and socialism both can appear in many various forms, not just one. Nazi Germany was certainly one example of a capitalist society. We haven't had any real examples of a socialist society as of yet because it's a rather new ideology and attempts at it have either been sabotaged from the outside or collapsed from internal forces. Not all that different from any historical period of transition where old forms are struggling to maintain control as new forms begin to emerge. So we can speak rather authoritatively on capitalism as it has a few centuries (~350 years or so) of data we can look back on. For socialism we only really have some experimentation at best, and false promises at worst. I'm sure the end of the feudal period looked similarly as new mercantile systems were appearing and being put down by feudal lords who felt threatened by a shift in power structures. We're not really to the point where we have a "third position" because we haven't properly seen the alternative to capitalism, but given enough time it too will come along and replace whatever comes after capitalism whether it's socialism or something else.
You have stated that 1. Capitalists funded Nazi Germany, 2. that the USSR was disappointed Germany did not have a Bolshevik revolution, and 3. that Nazi Germany was in practice a capitalist regime. While these premises all may be true, these do not lead to, and you have not proven, or even spoken to, the possibility (or impossibility) that there could be a critique of capitalism under the framework of Nazi ideology.
>the possibility (or impossibility) that there could be a critique of capitalism under the framework of Nazi ideology.
It could be argued that the Nazi concept (or at least the valorization by the Nazis of the concept) of "blood and soil", which formed the core of the Völkisch movement could be construed as a proto critique of Capitalism. It reinforced the connection between people and the land they cultivated and was marked by elements of organicism, racialism, agrarianism, and populism. Key Nazi officials like Walther Darré (Minister of Food & Agriculture) and Reichleiter for agricultural policy were strong proponents of this concept. Interestingly, even Heinrich Himmler was a proponent of this though in a highly fantasized (unrealistic) way. Himmler's ideas in this regard were supposed to be the foundations of how "the eastern territories" after the war were to be organised, which was also echoed by Hitler at one point in time (I don't have the reference to this off-hand, but I can dig it up). Edit: I wanted to add that Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories) was another high-level Nazi official who was aligned to these kinds of views.
The point that I am trying to make is this: Nazi ideology to the extent that it existed as a coherent body did position itself against capitalism and communism. It did so by invoking a mythical condition involving what they referred to as "Blut und Boden" (the Blood and Soil concept), which attempted to establish an inextricable link between people and the land they occupy and cultivate. In many ways, this concept valorized "the peasantry", whose culture (ethos, one could say) would be - at least in Himmler's and Hitler's terms - warlike (this being the key "to keep the blood fresh and invigorated").
To this extent at the very least Nazi ideology could be considered to be contra the basic principles of capitalism (and communism).
Really? If mr millionaire decided to buy his plane as a big metal toy with lights for his kids to draw on and play on, would that be illegal? I think the government would let him get away with it. All technology usually has a few other potential uses even if it’s completely unorthodox.
So what’s your point, is that good or bad. The public don’t benefit from it is it even relevant?
I’m wondering what the point of “if we were to use it for anything else we would be breaking the law” is here, that’s what I’m challenging. If we were to use a billionaires plane in a way that specifically benefits the public I don’t see any relevant use of it besides it’s initial intent: to transport x people to y place. Now sure, the government can and very well might decide this public use to be illegal. However this doesn’t change the idea of the airplane purely becoming the essence of being transport. Whether it’s used for the public or for one individual, capitalist or communist, we’re still appropriating the use-value in materials in a way that alienates us from what they truly are.
It’s about the type of barrier. The legal barrier is a concrete literal barrier which will reward any imagination or alternative usage with punishment. The internal blocks we have where we fail to imagine other uses for things isn’t so much of a literal barrier, it is the result of a process and can easily or eventually be broken out of. Although.. surely these things are intertwined so how useful is it to even separate them ideas-wise, when in the world they come as a package.
Thanks for clarifying! I’m wondering though, if in an ideal or non-innate sense they are separate ideas (these physical and mental restrictions on creativity), does that still make Heidegger’s problem here a problem of capitalism or something greater? I guess I’ve just been trying to say that I’m seeing things from an angle that this problem will still present itself to us even in a socialist world. Perhaps in the sort of “enlightened” sociality that full-on communism could bring us, we will not have such an alienated relationship to use-value, but until we reach that “ideal” social and mental state amongst each other I think even in a petty socialist society with no laws restricting creativity we would still have this problem.
So I suppose I agree with you that the question of capitalism becomes relevant in working on this problem in todays context, but I don’t think addressing capitalism will get us closer to solving the problem, just getting another obstacle out of the way. Besides, illegality never stopped anyone from imagining better futures anyways 😉
I think you could say it emerged historically with capitalism but wouldn’t necessarily disappear with the disappearance of capitalism.
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Agreed the primary problem with the use of nature as resources is derived from capitalism, where even tho all the needs are met production must continue or else the whole system starts to breakdown, capitalism in its root can only exist as production is maximized for profits hence the need for perfectly usable things to be thrown away or hidden to keep prices in check. For example more than 7 times the food needed to feed the world is thrown away each yeR
Well. Yes and no. Your example is correct, but what if it were a truly communist society. No class, no money, etc etc.
While that plain is sitting there, it is still only potential.
Perhaps if companies were required to pay for ALL the consequences of their operations (e.g., oil and coal companies pay for cleaning up all the pollution they cause - otherwise known as externalities: "a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved"), they would be more likely to use their resources more wisely.
That will happen around the time pigs fly.
Similar claims have been made about things like heavier than air flying machines, racism, etc.
Wait, you're saying racism has ended? Even if you're talking about some small enlightened enclave somwhere.. you're really comparing the invention of the aircraft to racism? SMH. "the end of racism", that's quite a nice little bubble you've constructed for yourself.
> Wait, you're saying racism has ended?
I'm more so getting at the quantity and type of racism, over time.
> Even if you're talking about some small enlightened enclave somwhere.. you're really comparing the invention of the aircraft to racism?
Not really, I am more so using them two examples of humans making incorrect predictions about the future.
I could compare the invention of the aircraft to racism, but that is not what I'm doing.
> SMH.
Why?
> "the end of racism", that's quite a nice little bubble you've constructed for yourself.
Was it I who constructed that bubble, or you?
Here is a technique for checking: try to identify the portion of my text that contains that idea.
edit: voting on Reddit is often very counter-intuitive.
It's certainly not happening in the USA. Both parties are only interested in fighting each other rather than getting anything useful done.
Who knows about Europe....
> It's certainly not happening in the USA.
I don't disagree - things do not happen, until they happen.
But, for certain things to happen, certain conditions must first exist, and this can be a lot harder to discern than the end product, in no small part because the necessary conditions cannot necessarily be known....even in materialistic science, which is relatively easy.
> Both parties are only interested in fighting each other rather than getting anything useful done.
This is an excellent meme, but how true is it?
> > > > Who knows about Europe....
I suspect the same as with the US: nobody (from a technical perspective).
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Apparently you're not paying attention because there's a f'n war in Europe! "Who knows?" Do you watch the news at all? Deliberate, willful ignorance is worse than just ignorance. Plus, even reluctantly tolerating Trump in the Republican party, is accepting facism. Democrats may not get a lot done, but they are not actively destroying democracy. There is no equivalence. The two-party system is indeed very flawed. The status quo is sickening, especially seeing Biden to give up any Green principals to keep the price of gas low. But there are worse things. And the rise of the extreme right in Europe is one.
I mean, the current admin did just two of the largest infrastructure and clean energy spending bills in history. Hard to say that isn't getting anything useful done...
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That's still assigning an instrumental value to things, and thus still the kind of "technology" that Heidegger disliked. Though it would be a much better world than the current one, if that was done.
I love this idea and wish it were espoused more. If the real value of the goods or services were reflected in the cost, people would think a lot more about how they spend their money. Sure, many people might have to deal with less material goods, less luxury, less stuff...but the overall benefit might be that we don't completely render the planet unliveable in so short a time frame.
“Perhaps if companies -and the users of their products and services- were required to pay for ALL the consequences of their operations…”
Fixed it for you.
Caveat emptor
Why only charge them for the downside?
Let's say that the transport system that runs on oil and coal generates ten times the value (just picking numbers) of the sale price of the oil and coal that powered it. Should the company get a share of that?
They do, it's called profit.
They already do in the form of subsidies. Do a little research into how much the fossil fuel industry gets, maybe starting with Missippi and the offshore oil in the Gulf. They are handsomely rewarded, not just in huge profits that are only recently falling below the tech giants.
Wasn't he an unrepentant Nazi?
Yup, still a genius that more or less defined the early continental philosophical tradition along with Husserl and later Wittgenstein though.
Have to say that, personally, I think his ontology of being-in-the-world as an alternative to the subject/object (or mind/body) system is still revolutionary today though. Hard to understate his contribution to philosophy (massive influence on Satre).
But the man is morally repugnant. His mentor, Husserl, who more or less invented the philosophical system of phenomenology (which Heidegger heavily based his philosophy on) was a Jewish man, who he basically betrayed to get in with the Nazis. Terrible human being, and yet a proper once-in-a-generation type philosopher. Humans are complicated and Heidegger took that truth to the extreme.
>Humans are complicated
I think that's a bit of a cop out. The man was a nazi sympathiser and if your anecdote regarding his mentor is true then the man has no redeeming quality whatsoever.
Adhering to the nazi ideology isn't just something you do out of habit or because it's customary to do so.
Not trying to defend him at all. Just trying to say that the brilliance of his philosophy in contrast with his collosal moral failings is hard to explain. I know it's a cliché to say humans are complicated, but I struggle to find another way to put it. Just wanted to confirm that I think he is a reprehensible and disgusting human being for what he did; further, it's made even worse by the fact he never outright repented his actions either.
The complicated part is that he did foundational and important work in the field of ontology and other areas of Philosophy, while being a morally viscous person. No one here is arguing his moral and political choices are complicated, they are simply and directly abhorrent - and we should acknowledge them as such.
Lets say a mathematician is a horrible person, a nazi even in this case. Yet they make a discovery of an equation that is highly valuable and even ground braking. The acknowledgment of the significance of the math they discovered shouldn't be thrown away because of their horrific moral and personal life. The two can be divorced as long as their moral character is remembered. The discovery in itself can be celebrated and praised for its own use, while simultaneously condemning the person who discovered it. The same here is being said of Heidegger.
Yeah, I agree with this sentiment in general. If a person is morally repugnant or bankrupt that should be remembered. But their contributions to society aren't diminished because of that. You can absolutely cherry pick the good parts of a bad person's work.
>The man was a nazi sympathiser and if your anecdote regarding his mentor is true then the man has no redeeming quality whatsoever.
Show your work please.
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Italics not sufficient I see...
> The man was a nazi sympathiser and if your anecdote regarding his mentor is true then the man has no redeeming quality whatsoever.
Show your work please.
Source: a totally uninterrogated understanding of good and bad
And he fucked Hannah Arendt which makes no sense until you read about Hannah Arendt and realize that she was pretty weird in her whole life.
She was also a genius. Hannah might have been one of the smartest chain smokers to ever live.
With a soft spot for Nazis, both Heidegger and Eichmann. Sometimes I wonder if she just did it for the controversy but I think she truly did believe that the Nazis were, like they say, not bad people, just following orders.
She was also a racist with elitist attitudes against "Oriental" Jews which was common back then and actually still somewhat common today in Israel but obviously no longer acceptable among the educated. I'm a Moroccan Jew who she would have looked down upon, so kind of not a fan of her elitist yekke bullshit!
What a weirdo.
Yeah kind of funny that this is coming from a dead white man Nazi and getting attention when there's so many other sources to get this kind of info from. Like Indigenous peoples the world over who are still actively being genocided.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I find arguments like these to be of very little value. Suggesting that the value of a river is more than the hydroelectric energy that can be extracted from it is certainly true, but that's hardly important if you are living in a home without electricity so that people can relate poetically to a river. There seems to be this romanticism about returning to a time where people lived closer to nature; but those types of lifestyles simply aren't sustainable with the population we have now. So we have a choice, we can embrace the fact that it was technology that allows us to support the lifestyle we have now, and that the greatest luxury we have afforded ourselves is each-other; or we can go back to living closer to nature and accept that many billions of people will have to die for us to get there.
One could look at some of the religious philosophy of shinto as being a way of connecting that sense of gratitude and a less human-centric veiw of nature. Shinto doesn't have an afterlife like heaven or hell, rather your spiritual stuff sort of breaks down and returns to the world because the world is all there is. There are hidden aspects of it but the afterlife is all around you so the idea of how one treats their environment becomes not something that you use and one day abandon for something else when you die but this is essentially all there is.
In a way that acknowledges the closed system we live in a lot more than a lot if western philosophy/religion does as the idea that we either live on in a separate disconnected realm or cease to be entirely after death doesn't capture that sense of responsibility one might have to previous generations to maintain the world as a living recycling system or to preserve it for future generations. How we conceptualize our connection and dependance on the Earth for our continuation is often subverted in our fantasy storytelling by the existence of other worlds or an eventual escape into space. In a way it feels akin to a denial of death as a very present danger but on a level of our species.
We are thematically made uncomfortable by both our complete dependance on these finite spaces and by extention the idea that we may be failing in a collective responsibility. "To hell with you I got mine" is a very common attitude of a very individualistic type that washes one hands of those anxieties by limiting one's care of something to their immediate personal use.
> the idea that we either live on in a separate disconnected realm or cease to be entirely doesn't capture that sense of responsibility one might have to previous generations
The part your missing is that whether or not the idea is TRUE is infinitely more important than how it can be contextualized with respect to some kind of responsibility to past or future generations, and it IS true. We are currently using all kinds of technology to support a population that's many orders of magnitude higher than would be possible if we all lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, or subsistence farming communities.
The technological adaptations for population inflation have precedent in a lot of our history. The application of the potato as a food crop boosted the population of a lot of European countries due to the amount of calories one could grow on relatively poor soil and in Ireland and Britain that population later collapsed when viruses wiped out the crop and aid in the form of utilizing stores of imported foods were witheld. Spirituality is fairly key in shaping how we perceive our place in the world and while Heidegger has his "hold on a minute the world is finite" moment it is good to acknowledge that that philosophy is a lot older than he is through the lens of certain religion.
The river's value in a prior example is not limited to human's rather narrow concept of use. It is also an ecosystem that benefits other species, is a channel for delivering water and nutrients to plants and evaporation for weather patterns and if abused can become a vector for poisons. One could look at ghe preservativion of natural resources as not in the terms of commodity but of intergenerational wealth. If a system of artificial population support collapses much like the humble potato, it takes a swath of humanity with it.
Those "types of lifestyles" were sustainable for hunter-gatherers and Indigenous peoples, so the amount that we have is not quite the point.
Also, there is no way we are going to survive if people keep thinking they can extract from nature indefinitely. Ecosystem collapse is going to happen and all those people you're talking about are going to die, so we'd better figure it out.
Yes, the amount we have is quite the point. Because if you want to go back to a world where everyone lives hunter gatherer lifestyles where they and a small kin groups control large areas of land in which to hunt and gather and otherwise live an indigenous lifestyle; the population of the world we can support is going to be a fraction of what it is today. How do you propose we get the population back down to hunter-gatherer levels?
I'm not proposing we do such a thing. We're going to have to figure it out, and part of that is getting better in touch with nature. We can't afford the kind of blunders that will lead to ecosystem collapse (I can just spray pesticides for years without any consequences!), so we'd better get keen at noticing and understanding what's happens in ecosystems -- and some "romanticism" would be damn helpful in that pursuit!
That's just completely wrong. The thing that will be helpful in avoiding ecosystem collapse isn't going to be romanticism, it's going to be technology. Take your example of pesticides: we don't spray them because we hate the poetry of nature, we spray them because we need to be able to make sure that the food we're growing is going to be eaten by humans and not insects. The solution isn't to be better in touch with nature, it's to understand the technologies that can prevent the crops from being lost without spraying them with chemicals. It's a classic case of enlightenment values versus romantic values; we're not going to romance our way out of this, we're going to enlighten our way out of this.
>The thing that will be helpful in avoiding ecosystem collapse isn't going to be romanticism, it's going to be technology.
Technology, in addition to the good it has done humans, has done plenty of bad; it 100% created these problems. It is not going to solve them unless it is thoughtfully and mindfully designed, with a multivalent view of natural forces that does not reduce nature's enormous complexity to "problem->technosolution."
This is just mind-bogglingly naive thinking in 2022.
Tech is not our lord and savior. Tech people now understand that the ethics of tech involve mindful design and that the way that tech has been designed has frankly screwed us over.
>Take your example of pesticides: we don't spray them because we hate thepoetry of nature, we spray them because we need to be able to make surethat the food we're growing is going to be eaten by humans and notinsects.
And yet, if we'd had a more capacious and accurate and appreciative view of the complexity of nature's ecology, maybe we would have realized that dumping some of these very simple pesticides onto the land was going to have far-reaching consequences way into the future, like oh reducing insect biomass by orders of magnitude and destroying the pollinators we need to grow crops.
We do need better technology for our survival - technology guided by a love of nature, and that uses a desire for better human-nature relations as a point of inspiration.
>. It's a classic case of enlightenment values versus romantic values;we're not going to romance our way out of this, we're going to enlightenour way out of this.
If you actually knew what the Enlightenment actually thought about this -- and full disclosure, I do, I study the transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism and have read hundreds of source texts from both eras -- you'd understand that the two movements were not binary but that the people who understood the limits of reason and technology best were often the Enlightenment thinkers themselves. Within their own time period, the most sophisticated thinkers among them were starting to understand that thinking of rationality and technology in salvationary terms was unbelievably simpleminded. They had their own version of a very laudatory view of Nature, having to do with natural harmony and natural law, and were (by the way!) very prone to glorifying Native Americans and using their lack of money, low tech, and closeness to nature as a means by which to self-critique European culture itself, but Romanticism actually sprung right out of their own critiques of reason and tech and the direction our relationship with nature was going, with the added layer of urgency the clear and present downsides of the Industrial Revolution provided. So yeah. Sorry. The Enlightenment provided the very critiques that the Romantic movement used as a launching point.
Its also by no means a modern phenomenon or related to technology. I remember learning about the pilgrims and other early American Settlers and how they believed that nature was chaotic and immoral and how they could bring order and Christian values to it by planting farms and settling their families. Medieval zoological texts make similar assertions and generally characterize any animal that is dangerous as immoral and useless and any animal that can be exploited as a gift from God.
This is not Jean Jacques Rousseau, it's an argument against being possessed by the spirit of technology, possessed meaning we see the world only through its eyes and we're not even aware of the framing.
Can you give me any reason to believe that there is ANYONE on Earth who sees things the way you are describing them? Do you see the world that way? Do you know anyone who has told you they see the world that way? Or are you just projecting that world view onto people you disagree with?
I'm not disagreeing overall except on the point that going back to nature is not Heidegger's point. Sorry.
Having a more poetic instead of technological relationship with nature absolutely IS Heidegger's point. Sorry.
Heidegger's (imo ofc) is poetic, but not going back to nature. It tries to integrate the opposites (nature vs tech) rather than pick one.
Nature and technology are not 'opposites.' You are trying to obfuscate with semantics, but my underlying point remains clear. A poetic relationship with nature doesn't allow more people the privilege of getting to be born and getting to live to adulthood; technology does. I don't see how you can argue around that but clearly you're going to keep trying.
You're partly right but that's not Heidegger's point I believe. He wants to merge nature and technology poetically and psychologically more than arguing for nature against technology.
First off, I disagree that his point wasn't to have a more poetic relationship with nature IN LIEU of a more technological one instead of having a a more poetic relationship with nature IN ADDITION to having a more technological relationship with nature.
Second off, even if his point was to merge nature and technology 'poetically' that's an argument that's so subjective as to be useless. What I consider a poetic merger, others wouldn't consider poetic at all. You might as well be arguing that our relationship with nature should just be 'better' because that's as subjectively valid as 'poetic' and also as devoid of specificity.
Isn't seeing the world as so many resources to exploit as old as the bible?
In Genesis 1:26-28, we read how God created man, blessed him, and told him to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Isn't this even older, embedded in the very nature of life ? I mean, any living organism spreads and exploits resources.
Eh I think this is twisting nature a bit to support exploitative views. Plus there's something additional about us that means we don't have to abide by the actions of all other living organisms.
On my first point, it can be seen that way if you consider anything beyond laying down at birth, not consuming anything, and dying, to be the true form of "no exploitation". Otherwise I'd say most animals take what they need and don't cause too much harm back to the local environment. Especially no where even near the scale of what we do. Even the species that do, we identify them as "invasive species" and have government funded programs to eradicate them. Even then, most invasive species are at the fault of humans.
Secondly, we are intelligent conscious beings that with the right mindset can live in harmony, or as close to it, with the rest of nature. We have science that observes nature and let's us know the standing of our actions. We currently have plenty of evidence to support that our actions are directly causing many ecological disasters and yet we make no action to improve. Rather we double down and continue to increase growth with no control. Nature he checks and balances, usually in the form of predators, to ensure that things are running smoothly. Humans have no meaningful predators except each other and planet earth.
"Dominating earth" is somewhat naturally embedded but we make conscious decisions on what natural things we support or not. Rape is a common natural occurrence yet we understand the morals of that much deeper than other animals so we try to get rid of it in society. We can make the same decision for exploiting nature and conclude it's something we should not do. Nature is amazing in so many ways, yet it's not perfect and has it's fair share of the "dark side" too.
I actually did mean it quite literally what I said and in no sensationist sense. Also I don't agree with your explanation of how nature and species behave but I do agree with some of your conclusions about humaninty. So let me explain myself in more detail:
Life in general spreads and consumes resources without any intelligent plan or design. It just spreads and consumes. I can agree with you that most living organisms and animals take what they only need but this is true only for individual creatures/entities. But when taken from the perspective of the whole species, any life form just spread until they hit a wall of what environment can sustain - in complex ecosystems there is an equilibrium of various factors and species which define these walls and balances out among each other.
I do agree however that humanity has capabilities that are unprecedented among Earth's life forms. It is this consiousness which you are talking about. It is the neocortex ability to visualize future and reason about it. So we can plan and organize the very aspect of life like the reproduction or resource consumtion. We can have intelligent plan and intelligent design instead of being mere game of life cells.
No doubt, I definitely didn't explain it the best as I've made those connections but haven't dove too deep into it yet. I think you explained it very well though!
I think it’s worth noting that the Bible has not been ethically translated across time
Possible. Do we have more accurate translations of this passage?
Is there any difference between an ethical translation and a good translation? Unless by ethical you mean sanitised.
By ethical I mean, within the spirit of the work or atleast transparent about the translators own biases. If your goal is to keep medieval Europeans subservient and illiterate, I question your ability to ethically translate the Bible.
Well, the will to power is strong, but it is not my goal.
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>but really what we want is a more romantic relationship with nature again
When did that ever exist on a large scale?
It's always feels like that's part of the "noble savage" mythos which didn't actually ever happen.
Poets/writers talking about it? Sure. But not at large.
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To support what OP says - although I am not a historian and can't confirm larger sentiment - if you read Chief Seattle's letter to the government you get that perspective.
Wholeheartedly agree with that perspective in the sense that we are ..ants crawling around and buying and selling land is kinda like buying and selling planets - we actually never OWN shit in the first place. Pretty sure nature is going to be fine, been around for billions of years, we nurse from it for a bit and it graciously allows us to not die for a bit.
It may be too late. Much of the world may be turning into a "MadMax" hellscape. I think you're greatly underestimating how central fossil fuel tech is too our global civilization, not just "tech" generally. Forget social media. As far as Boomers, I think you're throwing stones from a glass house. Boomers are intimately familiar with the "romantic relationship with nature" because it was called "being a hippie" back in their day!
You want something that never existed. We have never had a more "romantic" relationship with Earth than we do today.
But that's a second order problem with your comment. The first problem that needs to be addressed is that we need to define "romantic" and we need to understand what outcomes that relationship with nature has that differ from the outcomes of other relationships, and then determine which set of outcomes is more appealing based on predefined criteria. If you say you want something, you need to provide evidence to support why that thing is desirable. Otherwise you're just stating an aesthetic preference.
Cringe and utilitarian-brained
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Oh my god, is that why he's a reference in FF7?
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I wouldn't read too far into it. The reception of German philosophy in Japan is a long and fascinating topic--especially in regards to the Kyoto School which has some controversial tensions between technics, nature, and how the two potentially impacted wartime policies. There's even some speculation that Heidegger and philosophers in Japan responded to one another and shaped each other's thought. But I'm going on a tangent and that's a discussion for another day.
>alternative
Why not both?
"...has destroyed our relationship to the world ....
-
And, now, it has destroyed the actual world.
The spectrum of culture spans from conserving and progressing. It’s weird to think of art as a conservative movement but with the death of postmodernism, I think we have returned to this more conservative idea of beauty and nature that Heidegger describes.
As a younger man I wanted my poetry to be new and avant-garde. Now I just want to make something beautiful, and more often than not, I turn toward a time when the world was slower, and people took more care with their lives because their lives were harder and more precious in their difficulty. I try not to get pastoral or fantasize about an idealized past, but there’s no denying that things built with care are the only things which last.
In a modernity defined by consumption, “conservatism” can be anti-capitalist.
Note: there’s a reason that pastoralism is at the heart of most fascism—because it’s enchanting. If you really want to understand the link between nazi rhetoric and Heidegger, you should read Hölderlin.
“The question of Being has been utterly neglected since the work of Aristotle.
After millennia of neglect, Martin Heidegger made it his life’s work to ask just this question. He called it the “Seinsfrage” — the question of Being — and his work in this field has earned him the reputation among professional philosophers as one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century.”
So…I may not be a philosopher, and I’m definitely a materialist / objectivist / whatever… but that first sentence rings of hyperbole. The question of being utterly neglected for over a thousand years?
I know nothing in the subject, can anyone back that claim up?
And as a follow up, I want to see if I understand his two points.
Seinsfrage, the question of being… I think he would reject any answer to that question that was simple enough to be called complete. “What is a door”? A door is more than a description and a purpose. It’s an object and an idea, difficult to define. A door is a door because we see it as a door. It’s defined by its relationship to how it is seen and used.
People are the same. We are an intricate web of relationships, physical identities and interactions, ideas and conceptions. That’s what I would call his Seinsfrage, an attempt to wrestle with that question and try to get to the bottom of it, and to encompass the whole of the being rather than isolate any one or two parts of it that are easier to grab onto.
As for technological vs poetic…that seems straightforward enough. Technological is a utilitarian view of the world, things are defined by how useful they are. But like, yeah, obviously that’s wrong. I’m tempted to accuse him of setting up the opposing side as a straw man. Ask anyone who loves their cat, or child, or car — these things have a significance beyond their usefulness. To argue that people think otherwise is absurd.
But sure, if we accept the premise that people have this technological view of the world, where things are defined by their purpose and usefulness, then obviously there is something missing. Such a perspective on life would be immensely joyless. Such a view of the world would struggle to answer the age old questions “Why are we here? What is the point of it all?” Such a view of the world would have no place for telling jokes with your friends, for loving another person, or for anything that couldn’t be described as useful. Many good things, many joys in life, would be lost in such a technological world view.
Is that supposed to be groundbreaking?
Idk. Y’all think I got him right? Did I miss his point?
> Idk. Y’all think I got him right? Did I miss his point?
i like how you ended this :)
> Ask anyone who loves their cat, or child, or car — these things have a significance beyond their usefulness. To argue that people think otherwise is absurd.
but look how we often relate to ourselves: as a resource to be exploited. we try to be successful and such. how do we relate to our free time? often as a resource to be exploited, maximized, etc.
> Such a view of the world would struggle to answer the age old questions “Why are we here? What is the point of it all?”
many young people do struggle with this. H's point, I think, is that out from under the spell of the technological age, that would not necessarily be the norm.
> Such a view of the world would have no place for telling jokes with your friends, for loving another person
that's a leap. jokes in themselves don't necessarily make life worth living. and look at how we often regard our romantic partners: with an eye on the efficiency and duration of harmony achieved. divorce is not celebrated in our culture because of this "technological" bent toward efficiency and productivity and exploitation of resources (the resources here being "love in one's heart" and "time spent on earth"). i think H's point is that it definitely could be, but it would be a radical shift.
To the people pointing out Heidegger was a nazi. The relationship is more complicated than pointing out what we already know.
I find Heidegger preferred a direct relationship with the world instead of through an intermediary such as technology.
A direct relationship with the world doesn't dictate your willingness to destroy it or not. Many cultures claiming to appreciate nature still destroyed it. Using technology as an excuse or proxy doesn't really add up.
Although I don’t bring up the issue of destruction and nature, I will add that technology can be used as an intermediary to appreciate nature. One example can be through nature shows and the like. Another is through empirical analysis. However, they both still don’t solve the issue with tech as an intermediary as opposed to a direct relationship with the natural environment.
I don’t mean “nature” or “natural environment” in the western sense. But in the phenomenal sense.
I know what you're saying regarding nature and my point stands. Using it as an excuse doesn't add up. Seeing as how there are people that still destroy nature in a phenomenal sense sans technology.
Okay. I guess I’m just confused as to the point of the comment. Since I didn’t discuss destruction or using nature as an excuse.
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He was a boozy beggar who could drink you under the table.
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Technology as mastery. The suggestion of, "The daring young men and their flying machines". Early science was portrayed as a manly act, one of mastery over nature. The view was promoted by the Royal Society. Heidegger's cautions on the glorification of technology are almost a counterpoint to this power narrative. Does the artisan become something less than their tools as they become more advanced? What do we lose from ourselves when we become more invested in them? Maybe we lose some of ourselves and lose our connection to our sense of self and the world we use them in. Claiming mastery our sense of wonder dies. 25 years ago or more I wrote a paper on Heidegger and Kierkegaard. My prof didn't like it and said it read more like a sermon than a paper. I thought that was the point.
The methane hydrates are being liberated from the shallow ocean floor in East Siberian Arctic shelf .So that's game over.
What technology to Heidegger was, is different from what it has become today. What fascinates me is how his philosophies presented with reference to the initial phases of technology hold true in reference to the modernized world. The poetic relationship with the world is an appealing alternative. A large faction of human beings are in turn treating nature as just something to exploit, to get resources from. This serves our present demands well but is surely going to prove destructive in the long run.
Out of curiosity, how did he feel about forced labourers being exploited?
"Technological mindset" is a weird mental gymnastic to avoid criticising capitalism and consumerism (the real culprits behind the exploitation of nature). Instead of romanticizing primitivism we'd be better off with more useful hands and brains on working toward a solution to climate change.
The problem is that you don't change the mindset of the masses just like that within a couple of years. That couple of years, in fact, that we have left to switch away from exploitation of nature before it is really too late to save our livelihood.
He was also super a Nazi
Which is why I love composting. You view everything as a resource to put back in the ground.
Technology is a distraction, mostly welcome, but can be another escape, another way to disassociate, see people as objects or compartmentalize them into problems (my parents, my ex, my my my). It facilitates expediency, which leads to bad decision making. Like everything else, alcohol or appearance, it’s how you handle it, or if you recognize when you’ve gone too far or depended too much. It’s staying ahead of it, like staying ahead of an airplane.
Getting behind a habit, it has affected other habits, now you’re just trying to catch up and the plane is spinning out of control.
Technology is only as valuable as the convenience it brings us
It's not technology. It's unregulated capitalism. Technology can used for good purposes or not. Capitalism is inherently destructive and wasteful, and it feeds into our primitive base emotions. Capitalism exploits, among many things, technology.
Don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. Technology is basically inherent to humanity if we can consider language to be technology (and I think there’s a strong case that we can)
Too bad dude was a nazi
Too bad Plato was a pedophile. Still worth knowing what he had to say.
He was also an ardent Nazi. Ahh the duality of man
The birth of the study of artsyfartsyism.
Martin Heidegger, literal Nazi philosopher.
Yes? this is known
But not mentioned anywhere in this comment section, and I thought it relevant to point out to anyone who might not be in the know. The fact colors his philosophy, and it's not a pretty color.
Who the fuck is downvoting this? It’s a stone cold fact.
heidegger prooved that Tme equals Being - and dropped the mic
We don't need Heidegger to have this relationship with nature---just look at how Native Americans or pretty much any indigenous group looks at nature vs. modern society.
That's extremely ignorant.
Lol how so? In what way are Heidegger's contributions essential to our relationship with nature?
No, your understanding of native cultures is ignorant. Heidegger can suck a rusty dick.
Native cultures are and were no better than we are at living in harmony with nature. Plenty of them were horrendously destructing to the environment. The noble savage myth is still a racist stereotype. Natives are people, and people are the same, everywhere and everywhen. We take from the environment as much as we can, and then write poetry about how sad that is. That's just as true for the 1700s Mohawks as for the 1000s Inuit, as for the 1800s British or the first people coming out of Africa.
Nah, this is just your assumption that I was referring to the "Noble Savage Myth". That's your projection, not mine. If you honestly believe modern society is more sustainable/connected to nature than pretty much ANY indigenous group that is by DEFINITION prior to contact with European land exploiters, sustainable you are out of your mind. There's a middle ground between "Nobel savage" and "TheY ArE JuSt LiKe EurOpEAnS". Like if you study those cultures you can gain an appreciation for the fact that sustainability was more of a rule than an exception. Many developed a kinship with the land that views what nature gives us as far more than material resources, but rather a spiritual connection that is quite unlike the typical modern relationship. Speaking about that isn't evoking the Noble Savage Myth, and it is offensive that you would assume any mention of a non-consumption oriented indigenous philosophy as such.
My point is that however sustainable indigenous peoples were and are is usually due to accidents of technology, not due to some philosophy. And there was nothing sustainable about the Aztecs, for example. They were literally a colonialist empire like the British, consuming in similarly destructive ways. On the other hand, some farming societies, or hunter gatherer societies were relatively static, just like farming in Ireland or Poland for more than a millennia.
It's just an accident of technology.
And, for what it's worth, today there are people like you who care about sustainability, and have access to tremendous technology to help create sustainability on a scale that no Mohawk could dream of. You, today, can do more good for the environment than anyone living 1000 years ago. That's important to recognize, just as it's important to recognize our destructive power as well.
Again, I find this perspective quite Euro-centric. When evaluating a system, the degree to whether people intentionally created it or not, whether it comes from a coherent philosophy or not, is irrelevant. For example, humans evolved through an unintentional process over millions of years, and yet somehow our brains, at least as far as we know are among the most complicated things we know about. Is the fact that the process was unintentional even remotely relevant to its complexity or capacity? Of course not.
Indigenous systems often do evolve unintentionally because their users are focused on outcomes, such as surviving---and by definition any surviving indigenous group/culture possesses such systems. There are classes of knowledge valued by scientists called Local Knowledge that encapsulate how indigenous people happen to, through just surviving on the land for generations---develop sustainable practices, an understanding of the thousands of relevant species around them, and their major interactions with themselves, other species, and the environment itself. It isn't that this came from some noble philosophy given to them by some religion---it came because they survived and they needed that knowledge, which is often passed down from generation to generation to do so. Learning about it, specifically from a scientific perspective and how to integrate those systems of knowledge which weren't developed intentionally into an intentional practice that CAN be done intentionally, IS super important.
Yes, you are right, not every indigenous group has Local Knowledge and not every group has ideas or conceptions of reality that different from the ones that modern humans have, but their history of survival and the adversity of their experience has shaped them in a way that the majority of people living in Western consumption oriented societies can learn from and given that so much of that history is colored in the evils of colonization and rampant exploitation SHOULD learn from.
My people lived here for tens of thousands of years without destroying the whole place. Your people annihilated the continent in 500 years.
It wasn't some high moral choice. It was being a stone/bronze age culture.
And the Native Americans wiped out several large species that we know of shortly after their arrival to the Americas. Hunted to extinction due to being big/slow and therefore easy food.
No but it was an immoral choice to destroy the continent in 500 years.
>Natives are people, and people are the same, everywhere and everywhen.
Have you done much travelling?
I gotta say, the commenter is right that the truth lies between the noble savage and your we are all the same, always alternative.
While the Indigenous relationship with Nature is often highly simplified and politicized -- some species were definitely hunted to extinction, they sometimes did extract more from the land than it could give and paid the price, etc - it is very much demonstrably true that they had a more intuitive and sutainable way of relating to the environment than we do. They have done studies and reviews on this.
I recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, bac5665. It's fascinating and well supported and I feel has really enriched my perspective on this subject. It comes to a different conclusion than you do here.
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Oh and he was also a Nazi. Look up the black notebooks
I don't take advice from Nazis.
The best alternative to our metaphysical worldview is dialectical materialism, because it is rooted in reality
Except it isn't dialectical and it isn't even material.
bold statement, please elaborate
It somehow tries to have its hegel blattering cake, and then pretends it's not wishful idealist thinking too.
You just disproved yourself with that source, I do not understand what you are trying to say here. I really want to know, I don't mean to discredit you.
And I meant for you to read my comment there.. it's just that it's basically impossible to explain this in brief, without accusations of having missed "something".
But many scientific models are based around philosophical theses. In sociology for example, the ground concept for the tragedy of the commons to work , is the assumption that humans rather act in the way that they have the most individual utility, rather than acting in a way that makes everyone benefit from it. What is beneficiary for the collective is always better for the individual (pareto optimum). This entire theory though is an excerpt of reality that ignores its causes and consequences, it is based around metaphysics. Philosphy itself may not be scienfic, but it influences sciences a lot.
> But many scientific models are based around philosophical theses.
Not really? Philosophy of science certainly informs science, but it's still philosophy.
> In sociology for example, the ground concept for the tragedy of the commons to work , is the assumption that humans rather act in the way that they have the most individual utility, rather than acting in a way that makes everyone benefit from it.
Economics is not really sociology, but nonetheless utilitarianism is just a constraint you put inside a game theoretical model. Whether that applies to the real world in a given situation is a totally different thing.
> What is beneficiary for the collective is always better for the individual (pareto optimum).
The principle you are talking about is enlightened self-interest.
Pareto efficiency can totally mean "less" for a given single individual (and again, it's just a super handy tool for theory.. there are no imperatives in science)
> This entire theory though is an excerpt of reality that ignores its causes and consequences, it is based around metaphysics.
Ethics is metaphysics, by all means.
> Philosphy itself may not be scientific, but it influences sciences a lot.
Nothing to add there (except perhaps that there's still too little of it).
But put aside the criticism specific to that particular video. Even if it's buried inside a wall of text (and that's the recap) dialectics in this sense is just a disingenuous way to claim a win by dispensing with logic.
Can we please not present as valid the work of people who helped work to kill several of my great uncles (and mostly succeeded)?
PositiveStrength5694 t1_itpu7an wrote
I believe it might be more accurate to not talk about technology but the essence of technology, as that is what Heidegger is really interested in. Furthermore saying that "everything is now measured by its instrumental value" seems to slightly misrepresent the phenomenological relation we now have, how things are not merely seen or measured as, but ARE only its instrumental value. A stationary airplane is no longer an airplane that can move an x amount of people, but becomes ONLY the potential of this transport of people.