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May 9, 2004
Trevor,
while you are going gangbusters on Kant & Heidegger I'll plug along on Heidegger. Maybe our paths will criss cross in the forest.
I'm currently reading this in relation to Australian environmental philosophy. It is an account of the early chapters of Being and Time.
I approach being differently to you, namely hermeneutically. As Adorno said somewhere, philosophy is about interpretation. That is a succinct account of what Heidegger worked out in Being and Time. The method is a phenomenological one of returning to the things themselves (eg., Husserl's conception of the return to the things themselves is a return to the life-world). It is a commitment to investigate phenomena as people actually experience and live them.
If we work from the account of Being and Time then we live within a particular understanding of being, yet we are not able to render an account of it. It is very difficult for us to give an account of the technological understanding of being. We do have some sense of this understanding (as it is in what Dreyfus calls 'our everyday background practices'), but it still remains somewhat 'shrouded in darkness'.
That was the point of my earlier post on the plantation forestry industry in Australia. The Routley's had a glimmer of what the technological being that underpinned, or rather was embodied in the background practices of the state forestry ideology they opposed. But that conception of being was very unclear to them. They saw bits and pieces as distinct from the full picture. What they were doing was working up or constructing a theory from our 'average and vague understanding of being. They took our half-known features of ordinary experience which, on closer analysis, furnished the building blocks for thematised inquiry.
Let us call this understanding or how human beings are in the world (Da-sein) an economic utilitarian one. The Routleys situated themselves vis-a-vis the phenomena of interest by presupposing themselves to be standing outside technological being, rather than as being enframed by it and living within the technological understanding of being. the understaning of being they opposed was over there in another space to where they stood in the liberal university. As critical environmental subjects they undersatood themselves as standing outside the particular understanding of the meaning of being in late modernity.
From Heidegger's perspective they were living within the technological understanding of being and resisting that technological understanding from within.
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