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November 24, 2004
Since I 've been doing the political soft shoe shuffle in Melbourne all day and I have no energy to post. So I have reworked and reposted this entry from yesterday about Heidegger's paper called The age of the world picture.'
This paper is about the modernity's metaphysics of the becoming of human beings as subjects, human beings as the foundation of knowledge and the reduction of the world to a fixed image. This metaphysics was inaugrated by Descartes. Nietzsche is read as a variation of this metaphysics of modernity in which the world becomes a picture; the world is “conceived and grasped as picture”, where “whatever is comes into being in and through representedness”.
Two quotes:
"A world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world, but the world conceived and grasped as picture."
"The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture."
This passage may help us to make sense of these quotes. Heidegger says:
"The fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the new age. The world appears as re-presentation 'for man'. In the classical age, to the contrary man is the one who is looked upon by that which is. Put simply: the gods or God used to look upon us and we had a perception that they he watched us; now we look at the world and we understand the world as that which we can see. "
In this picture philosophy come to provide the concepts underpinning an ongoing programme of scientific research, and is then dissolved into the individual empirical sciences.
On Heidegger's very forceful reading of Nietzsche's texts Nietzsche reduces what there is to a projection of what it is to be human. Hence Nietzsche is the culmination of the metaphysics of modernity.
A question:
'Does the modern end when the world is no longer presented to viewers as a picture, to be subject to conscious utilitarian calculations and pre-determined actions with foreseeable ends?'
Heidegger's narrative is about radical transformation in our understanding of being that took place in the 17th century. The change was implicit in Descartes’ introduction of representation. Kant then made Descartes’ unthought explicit in the centrality of his notion of Vorsetellung. Heidegger's interpretation emphasizes the fact that human beings objectify everything:
"To represent means to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm ... What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development of humanity."
On this account human beings explain and evaluate whatever is, in its entirety from the standpoint of human beings and in relation to human beings. Everything else is elided.
Another and more familiar way of putting this is to say that this constitutes the humanistic understanding of being.
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i like your point here could you help make a good outline about hiedgger on technology...so i coudl make a good repot. thanks