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Heidegger Kritik
Explanation..................................................................................................................................................5
Glossary........................................................................................................................................................6
***1NC Transportation Shell*** (Ebore 1:32)............................................................................................7
***TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT LINKS***...........................................................................................9
Cost Benefit Analysis.................................................................................................................................10
Problem Solution (1)...................................................................................................................................11
Problem Solution (2)..................................................................................................................................12
Employment...............................................................................................................................................13
Shortening of Distance/Time (1)...............................................................................................................14
Shortening of Distance/Time (2)...............................................................................................................15
Guilt............................................................................................................................................................16
Economy.....................................................................................................................................................17
Fiat..............................................................................................................................................................18
Renewable Energy (1)................................................................................................................................19
Renewable Energy (2)...............................................................................................................................20
Solving Catastrophe...................................................................................................................................21
Opposition to Technology (1)....................................................................................................................22
Opposition to Technology (2)...................................................................................................................24
Energy (1)...................................................................................................................................................25
Energy (2)...................................................................................................................................................27
Sustainability.............................................................................................................................................28
War Representations.................................................................................................................................29
Knowledge-Production/Science...............................................................................................................30
Hydroelectricity.........................................................................................................................................32
Body Counts...............................................................................................................................................33
Security......................................................................................................................................................34
***CALCULATIVE THOUGHT LINKS***...............................................................................................36
Problem/Solution......................................................................................................................................37
Morality (1)................................................................................................................................................38
Morality (2)................................................................................................................................................39
Privatization..............................................................................................................................................40
Power (1).....................................................................................................................................................41
Power (2)....................................................................................................................................................43
Transport...................................................................................................................................................44
Democracy (1)............................................................................................................................................45
Democracy (2)...........................................................................................................................................46
Environmental Protection.........................................................................................................................47
Pacifism......................................................................................................................................................49
Transport...................................................................................................................................................50
Economy.....................................................................................................................................................51
Technology.................................................................................................................................................52
Globalization..............................................................................................................................................54
Human Spaceflight....................................................................................................................................55
Solar Energy...............................................................................................................................................56
Warming.....................................................................................................................................................57
Terrorism...................................................................................................................................................58
Necessities...............................................................................................................................................59
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Economic Leadership..........................................................................................................................61
K Affs..........................................................................................................................................................62
Science.....................................................................................................................................................63
***IMPACTS***.........................................................................................................................................65
National Security = War............................................................................................................................66
Brink Now..................................................................................................................................................67
***TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT IMPACTS***...................................................................................68
Calculability Internal Links.......................................................................................................................69
Being...........................................................................................................................................................71
Development..............................................................................................................................................72
Holocaust...................................................................................................................................................73
Predictions Turn Solvency.........................................................................................................................74
Politics Cant Solve Terrorism...................................................................................................................75
Value to Life (1)..........................................................................................................................................76
Value to Life (2)..........................................................................................................................................77
Genocide....................................................................................................................................................78
Ethics..........................................................................................................................................................79
Commodification.......................................................................................................................................80
Ontological Damnation..............................................................................................................................81
Exploitation/Domination..........................................................................................................................82
War/Environmental Destruction.............................................................................................................83
***CALCULATIVE THOUGHT IMPACTS***..........................................................................................84
Turns Case.................................................................................................................................................85
The Ontological Nuclear Bomb.................................................................................................................87
Racism/Sexism..........................................................................................................................................89
Value to Life (1).........................................................................................................................................90
Value to Life (2)..........................................................................................................................................91
Nuclear Annihilation.................................................................................................................................92
Slavery (1)..................................................................................................................................................93
Slavery (2)..................................................................................................................................................95
Environmental Destruction/Ontology.....................................................................................................96
***ROOT CAUSE***.................................................................................................................................98
Generic.......................................................................................................................................................99
Terrorism.................................................................................................................................................100
Anthropocentrism....................................................................................................................................101
Nihilism....................................................................................................................................................102
Freedom...................................................................................................................................................103
Totalitarianism........................................................................................................................................104
Biopower..................................................................................................................................................105
Capitalism................................................................................................................................................106
Democracy................................................................................................................................................107
Distance from the Other..........................................................................................................................108
Warming....................................................................................................................................................111
***REJECTION ALTERNATIVE***........................................................................................................112
Rejection Key............................................................................................................................................113
Alt Spills Over...........................................................................................................................................114
Thought Key..............................................................................................................................................115
Criticism Key............................................................................................................................................116
Alt Lets Beings Be.....................................................................................................................................118
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Rethinking Solves Tech Thought.............................................................................................................119
A/T Perm..................................................................................................................................................120
A/T Paralysis............................................................................................................................................124
A/T Must Act............................................................................................................................................125
A/T No Action..........................................................................................................................................127
A/T Calculative Thought Inevitable........................................................................................................128
A/T Life Needed For V2L........................................................................................................................130
A/T No Alternatives to Tech Thought.....................................................................................................132
A/T Not Real World.................................................................................................................................133
A/T We Can Control Technology/Tech Thought....................................................................................134
A/T Technology Good..............................................................................................................................135
A/T Alt = Genocide..................................................................................................................................137
A/T Alt = Nihilism...................................................................................................................................139
***FRAMEWORK BLOCKS***...............................................................................................................140
2NC Anti-Generic Anti K Framework.....................................................................................................141
Criticism Prerequisite..............................................................................................................................143
Ontological Thinking Key........................................................................................................................144
Policy Making Fails..................................................................................................................................145
Policy Making Theory..............................................................................................................................146
Resolved = Ontology................................................................................................................................147
Western Enframing Kills Solvency..........................................................................................................148
A/T Pragmatism Good.............................................................................................................................150
A/T Policymaking First............................................................................................................................151
A/T Cede the Political..............................................................................................................................152
A/T Risk-Assessment Good/Key to Policy..............................................................................................155
A/T Utopianism/Not Real World............................................................................................................156
A/T Util Good...........................................................................................................................................157
A/T Util Good- Turn................................................................................................................................158
A/T Util- Links to K.................................................................................................................................159
A/T K Primitive........................................................................................................................................161
A/T Science Good.....................................................................................................................................162
A/T Realism Good...................................................................................................................................168
A/T Realism..............................................................................................................................................175
A/T Falsification Good.............................................................................................................................178
A/T Action Precedes/Outweighs Ontology.............................................................................................179
A/T Positivism Good................................................................................................................................181
***ROLE OF THE BALLOT***...............................................................................................................182
Criticism (A/T Solvency Deficits)............................................................................................................183
Best Mode of Being..................................................................................................................................185
Prove Ontology.........................................................................................................................................186
***IMPACT CALCULUS***.....................................................................................................................187
***Ontology***........................................................................................................................................188
Apriori (1).................................................................................................................................................189
Apriori (2)................................................................................................................................................190
Being Outweighs Extinction.....................................................................................................................191
Outweighs Extinction (1).........................................................................................................................192
Outweighs Extinction (2).........................................................................................................................193
Key To Decisions......................................................................................................................................194
Outweighs Nuclear War (1).....................................................................................................................195
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Outweighs Nuclear War (2)..............................................................................................................196
Ontology = Ethics....................................................................................................................................198
Outweighs Ethics.................................................................................................................................199
Outweighs Ethics (Levinas).............................................................................................................201
***Value to Life***..................................................................................................................................202
Outweighs Death.....................................................................................................................................203
***Genocide***.......................................................................................................................................204
Genocide = Extinction.............................................................................................................................205
Genocide = D-Rule.............................................................................................................................206
***Dehumanization***......................................................................................................................208
Dehumanization Outweighs............................................................................................................209
Dehumanization Causes Genocide................................................................................................210
***AUTHOR BLOCKS***........................................................................................................................211
A/T Heidegger Rejects Tech/Tech Good................................................................................................212
A/T Heidegger = Nazi..............................................................................................................................214
A/T Heidegger = Paganism.....................................................................................................................218
A/T Heidegger = Racist...........................................................................................................................219
A/T Heidegger is Unqualified.................................................................................................................220
A/T Heidegger = Mystic..........................................................................................................................221
***Random Blocks***.............................................................................................................................222
A/T Artificial Intelliegence DA...............................................................................................................223
A/T Totalitarianism DA..........................................................................................................................224
A/T Habermas K of Heidegger................................................................................................................225
A/T Etymology Bad.................................................................................................................................226
A/T Truth Exists......................................................................................................................................227
A/T Schmitt/Clausewitz..........................................................................................................................228

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Explanation
Courtesy of Digger of Cross-X.com
"The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine... The Rhine itself appears to be something at our command.. The word expresses here
something more, and something more essential, than mere "stock." The word "standing-reserve" assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric... Whatever
stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as an object... The words "setting--upon," "ordering," "standing-reserve,"
obtrude and accumulate in a dry, monotonous, and therefore oppressive way this fact has its basis in what is now coming to utterance. Martin
Heidegger described in 1949 the idea of a Technological Mindset. This critique of the technik mindset gave way the modern day policy debate critique.
Many current debaters cannot grasp the nuances of the Heidegger argument. This has lead to a hate of the Heidegger critique. It has been run so badly
Bill Batterman, 3NR creater and Woodword Coach, has stated in his JudgeWiki, I have engaged in meditation on your K, it reveals itself to me, and it
still sucks. work harder. To rectify this problem you must learn the kritik from the ground up. Stop being lazy and stupid. Learn it.
To begin with, you must understand Heidegger's idea of phenomenology. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy phenomenology is
described as, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The idea of phenomenology was created by
German philosopher Husserl. Husserl was a professor at the University of Freiburg where Heidegger was a good friend and a student. Here had a
revolutionary idea. Husserl thought that the being of things, the essence and what they are, is defined and found by the phenomenon in this world. These
phenomenon are everything we sense. Our sights, feelings, smells. Everything that is observed by us is a phenomenon. Husserl stated that these
phenomenon, these observations by the viewer, allow us to find the things true being. Yet, after the end of WWI Heidegger began to doubt Husserl's view
that there was a true Being (A god in the sense of a absolute truth.) Because of this doubt, Heidegger began to redefine the view of phenomenology on
the world. He described that there was no true Being to things, and that everyone's Being is based off people's subjective perception of phenomenon.
He proposed that our perception changed the essence of people.

Now I shall explain my awesome paint drawing showing a visual representation of phenomenology. A is being shown as the sun. It is shining onto B
which is our orange. This casts a shadow (F) onto the wall which is E. Then sitting in front of wall C is our little Heidegger (D). The shadow is our
perceptions within the word. Heidegger is us. Walls C and E are the world. The object is any object in the world. Lastly, the sun is our senses allowing for
perception. Now our sense, the sun, sense this the object, the orange. This produces our perception of the object, the shadow. This process of our
perceptions take place ON and IN the world, the walls C and E. We sit in and on the world like lil' Heidegger and observe our perceptions with our mind.
These perceptions make us see the being of the object, in this case an orange. It is our perceptions, the shadow, that allow this object to become an
orange. If we saw the characteristics of a dog, we would believe the essence was a dog. But because we perceived this way it is this way. Yay for paint.
Now that we understand Heidegger's view on ontology, let us look at the kritik! Heidegger believed that the world today is seen in the technological
mindset. This mindset is when we begin to order things about. When a hydroelectric damn was put into the Rhine river, it was no longer seen as a
river. It was now just a power source waiting for us to use it. This makes the river become a Standing Reserve waiting for human's to use it. It looses it's
ontological status as an object because of it. It is no longer seen as an object or a river in any poetic or lived sense, but it's merely a resource for us to
gather. Because humans began to become so attached to this mindset, they began to view everything in this light. Woods are now seen as waiting timber,
mountains are seen as mineral deposits and even soldiers are seen as foot units and numbers to be calculated. Everyone begins to be seen as an object
and we lose all of our relationships with other people. Zimmerman describes this in '94 as an Ontological Damnation. This card sucks. Don't read it.
But what Zimmerman is meaning by this is that we'll reach a point where no one has an ontological relationship with anyone else. This makes it so we
shall never again come back to a point where we will have ontology. Once we reach the point where everyone has this mindset, no one will be able to go
back because they no longer see the value of people other than objectifying them, and we will, as the human species, get back to a point where we have a
form of ontology. Ontological Damnation... Hell on Earth... Masquerading in a material paradise.
In the context of a debate round, the kritik is simple. The Affirmative provides a plan which uses this technik mindset. As the negative you say this is bad.
We should oppose this mindset so as we do not lose out ontological valuing of the Earth and People. It is the root cause of all their impacts and your
impacts will out weight theirs (Go VtL).
I can not stress enough. You don't care about technology. It rules. It rocks. You love it. You want to have sex with it. You want to bring it to your house,
make love to it and be there in the morning to cook it breakfast and drive it to work. You concede technology rocks, in the sort of way that you want to
rock it all night long. You are kritiking the technological mindset, not technology. There is a large difference. The technological mindset is order things
about and making things standing reserves. Technology is not that. You kritik technik not technology. I can't stress this enough.
One last thing I can't stress enough. Read the fucking literature. It will better your understanding so much. It will make everything make sense. It will
make the terms become clear and every nuanced argument gold. Read the cards, read the literature.
Hopefully now that you understand the basics of the Heidegger kritik you will be able to understand the picture at the top. For more fun and help go to:
http://en.wikipedia....ian_terminology
http://en.wikipedia....artin_Heidegger
For questions: joncookdebate@gmail.com
One last thing, he was totally a Nazi.

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Glossary
Technological Thought- its not about technology, but seeing problems. For example,
when you see a person, you dont go this person is _________. But this persons
purpose is to _________.
Enframing- seeing something to be used
Standing Reserve- something that is used and abused
Ontology- the study of being
Epistemology- the study of knowledge
Posit- Base something on the truth of (a particular assumption)
Dasein- Being
Meditative Thinking- to take a step back from our daily lives of calculability and take in
everything around us
Calculative Thought- thought that is centered on measurement and is oriented toward
manipulation and control, striving to attain certainty and security.
Ontological Damnation- no one having any ontological relation with anyone else
Value to Life- Lifes value, its the question of lifes meaning being meaningful. A life
with value may be considered life in which one goes to work, gets paid, etc. (This can be
easily argued) It's quite literally the value of life. How much is life worth? There are
different arguments as to why it outweighs extinction, an obvious one would be what
does extinction mean if life itself is irrelevant?
Etymology- the origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning

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***1NC Transportation Shell***

The Development of Transport Creates Logic of Independence from the Earth that
Justifies Manipulation of the World.
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. 1)

the
invention of the automobile, then the airplane, and now our various vehicles for travel in
interplanetary space; the conquering of distances that has accompanied the development of
communications technologies such as radio, television, and film, and of course, the
changes in our thinking of and with the natural world that have come as we have
become seemingly more and more independent of the earth's forces, more and more
capable of outwitting them and even of harnessing them and forcing them to conform
to our wills. These changes - but more especially human beings' unreflective incorporation of these changes into our daily lives struck Heidegger as strange and very dangerous. It may well be that there is nothing really wrong with using a tractor to
plow one's land or with using a computer to write one's book, but there is something ominous, Heidegger believed, about
our not giving any thought to what is happening to ourselves and to the world when we
do those things, or our not noticing or at least not caring about the disruptions these changes bring about in the fabric of things. Heidegger calls
Heidegger often refers in his writings to the dramatic changes to which he was witness - the loss of rootedness to place that came with

us to give thought to - or give ourselves over to thought of - the strangeness of our technological being within the world. His works resound with calls for
human beings to grow more thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon where we are and what we are doing, lest human possibility and the most
beautiful of possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not understand and only pretend we can count on.

We are doomed to complete ontological damnation if we allow calculative mastery over

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

The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of metaphysics , Heidegger
speculates, will likely endure for a long time (EP 95). Indeed, there is no certainty that, from humanity's point of view, a
succession to some other mode of revealing truth is ordained. The technological quest may reach its climax, as it were, without us. In the
absence of an ontological reorientation, humanity would then be "left to the giddy whirl
of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty
nothingness" (EP 87). Estimating the likelihood of this apocalyptic conclusion is not Heidegger's concern. In any case, it is fair to say
that the physical annihilation of humanity is not Heidegger's most proximate worry.
Foremost in his mind is the ontological meaning of this potential self-annihilation . If, as
Heidegger put it, "the will to action, which here means the will to make and be effective,
has overrun and crushed thought," then our chances of escaping the catastrophic
whirlwind of enframing are slim indeed (WCT25). The danger is that intensive technological
production may simply overpower human being's capacity for manifold modes of
disclosure, displacing the freedom inherent in philosophic thought, artistic creativity, and
political action. Undeniably technology fosters thinking, creating, and acting of sorts. Calculation, cognition, innovation, and engineering are
highly valued within technological society, though even here it is not clear that computers and robots might not eventually displace more of these
capacities than their production demands. The real menace, however, is that social

engineering would obviate political

action, endlessly innovative production would leave artistic creativity to atrophy, and
utilitarian cognition would fully displace philosophic questioning." Because the human capacity for thought is the
foundation for artistic creativity and political action, Heidegger indicates that its loss is his most pressing concern. He writes, " In this
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dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatensprecisely when the danger of a
third world war has been removed. ... the approaching tide of technological revolution in
the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking
may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking" (DT 56). In the
wake of this revolution we find ourselves desperately in need of "an education in thinking" (TB 72). Such an education would, at a minimum, allow us to
discern why calculative thought could never adequately substitute for philosophic thought. In the absence of such learning, and in the continued thrall of
enframing, our capacity for philosophic thought may wither beyond resuscitation. Most

disturbing and dangerous, however,

this situation need not disturb or appear dangerous at all. Technological calculation
and innovation may satisfy both our intensified material needs and our diminished
spiritual demands. As Heidegger warns: "The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand
with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the
organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men" (WCT 30). Devastation
need not mean discontent. Indeed, technological devastation may consist in humanity's
creation of a brave and exciting new world. Utopia and oblivion , as Buckminster Fuller prophesied,
may well coincide. Devastation, Heidegger states, "is the high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne" (WCT 30). Mnemosyne, or
remembrance, designates not simply a recollection of what was, but also a "steadfast intimate
concentration" on and a "devotion" toward worldly things and affairs. Remembrance is the "constant concentrated
abiding with something not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may come. What is past,
present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being" (WCT 140). The

ex-pulsion of memory, therefore, is the

loss of the capacity to abide by, rather than challenge forth, the world. Once the fourfold is
reduced to an extension of our cerebral computations and technical orderings our
capacity to dwell within its horizons vanishes. We sit complacent in homelessness. The
devastation is complete
The Alt is to vote Negative to reject technological assumptions, which is a prerequisite
to effective action and allows us to expose the hegemony of technological thought. Its
not about what we do, but what we think
Botha 02
(Catherine, Dept. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Pretoria, Heidegger, Technology and Ecology, South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol 22, Issue 2, p.
ebscohost)
Attempts to force Heidegger's ideas into a frame work of action forget his intention of escaping the wilfulness inherent to the technological attitude. He
tells us explicitly that Human activity can never directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human reflection can
ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it (Heidegger 1993:399).
The question asked at the beginning of this article is therefore inappropriate in the context of Heidegger's views on technology. Heidegger wants us to

respond to the question what shall we think? rather than what shall we do?. Thought
must first save us from our typical modes of behaving, namely those oriented towards possessive mastery,
before we can move to action. Heidegger tells us that [t]hinking does not become action only be cause some effect issues from it or
because it is applied. Thinking acts in so far it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplist and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the
relation of Being to man (Heidegger, 1993:217). In this sense, the

question of what we should do in the face of the

technological crisis we are experiencing to day can only be meaningful in terms of what
we should think. Trying to force Heidegger's work into an ecological frame - work of action might convert it into the very willing which it is
trying to escape. In our time, the world will remain largely technological, but we can launch an
incisive critique of technology that exposes the hegemony of its present reign. From
this the saving power could grow. Admittedly, Heidegger does not give us much in terms of a political programme for change in
terms of action, but in view of his definition of technology, this is warranted.

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***TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT LINKS***

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Cost Benefit Analysis

The affs cost-benefit analysis turns the case and leads to technological thought
Shrader-Frechette 97
(ONeill Family Professor at Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame; Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Windsor.
Technology and Values, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.)
As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that
focusing on loss and destruction is still technological. All

attempts to reckon risking realityin terms of

decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely
technological behavior. Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must be solved
by appropriate action turns out to be technological too : The instrumental conception of technology conditions
every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technologyThe will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip
from human control. Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work. No

single man, no group of men, no

commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of
leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the
atomic age. His view is both darker and more hopeful. He thinks there is a more dangerous situation facing modern man than the technological
destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something can be doneat least indirectly. The threat is not a
problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which we
can be saved. Heideggers concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather than the destruction
caused by specific technologies. Consequently, Heidegger distinguishes the current problems caused by technology
ecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism, etc.from the devastation that
would result if technology solved all our problems. What threatens man in his very nature is theview that man,
by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human conditiontolerable for
everybody and happy in all respects. The greatest danger is that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate,
bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.

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Problem Solution (1)

The Affirmatives Attempt to Improve the World Re-entrenches them in the
Technological Thought that Recreates all Impacts.
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. 4)

Our usual response to such prophecies of doom is to ignore them Or, when we cannot do that. to scramble to find
some way to manage Our problems, some quick solution, some technological fix. But over and over again new
resource management techniques. new solutions. new technologies disrupt delicate systems even further.
doing still more damage to a planet already dangerously out of ecological balance. Our ceaseless interventions
seem only to make things worse, to perpetuate a cycle of human activity followed by ecological disaster followed by human
intervention followed by a new disaster of another kind. In fact. it would appear that our trying to do things. change things. fix things cannot be the
solution, because it is part of the problem itself. But, if we cannot act to solve Our problems, what should we do.

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Problem Solution (2)

Seeking "solutions" to the "catastrophe" and "destruction" of the status quo is
technological thought
Dreyfus 93
[(Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p.304)]
Nevertheless, although Heidegger does not deny that technology presents us with serious problems, as his thinking develops he comes to the surprising
and provocative conclusion that focusing

on loss and destruction is still technological : "All attempts to

reckon existing reality ... in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and
destruction, are merely technological behavior"
(QCT 48; TK 45-46). Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must be solved by appropriate action is
technological too: "The instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology....
The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip
from human control" (QCT 5; VA 14-15 ). Heidegger is clear this approach will not work. "No single man, no group

of men," he tells us, "no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake
or direct the progress of history in the atomic age" (DT 52; G 22).

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Employment
The Affirmative claims to solve unemployment merely deploys workers as central
tools of modern technological thought
Gauthier 04
(David, Phd Candidate in Poly Sci @ Lousiana State, "MARTIN HEIDEGGER, EMMANUEL LEVINAS, AND THE POLITICS OF DWELLING,"
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11052004-163310/unrestricted/Gauthier_dis.pdf)
After his confrontation with Nietzsche, Heidegger

would proceed to level a powerful critique of modern

technology, a critique that was greatly assisted by the work of another German thinker, Ernst Jnger.
For Heidegger, Jngers 1932 book The Worker (Der Arbeiter) illuminates how the worker is the
paradigmatic figure of the modern technological world. 5 According to Jnger, in the modern world each
individual life becomes, ever more unambiguously, the life of a worker; and that, following the wars of knights, kings, and citizens, we now have wars of
workers. 6 However, whereas

Jnger affirmed the arrival of a world stamped by the form

(Gestalt) of the worker, Heidegger took a more negative view.

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Shortening of Distance/Time (1)

The logic of distance and time is a representation of technological thought. Shrinking
the distances in all aspects of life to pure efficiency
Heidegger 1950
Martin Heidegger, June 1950, The Thing pg. 1
All distances

in time and space are shrinking. Humankind now reaches overnight, by plane,
places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. S/he now receives instant information,
by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. The germination and growth of
plants, which remained hidden through- out the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the most
ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today's
street traffic. More- over, the film attests to what it shows by presenting also the camera and its operators at work. The peak of this abolition of
every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole
machinery of communication. Man puts the longest distances behind him in the
shortest time. He puts the greatest distances behind himself and thus puts everything
before himself at the shortest range. Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist
in shortness of distance. What is least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on the radio, can remain far from
us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness.

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Shortening of Distance/Time (2)

The affirmatives technological attempt to remove the distance between humanity
and space reduces it to an ontological standing reserve.
Harman 09
(Graham, Professor of Philosophy @ American University in Cairo, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2009, Vol. 34(1), Technology, objects and things
in Heidegger p.17-25) JM
All distances in time and space are shriveling (Heidegger, 1994, p. 5).4 So go the opening words of Heidegger's 1949
Bremen lectures. Physical distance is dissolved by aircraft. The radio makes information instantly available that once went unknown. The formerly slow
and mysterious growth of plants is laid bare through stop-action photography. But Heidegger is unimpressed by these technological gimmicks: the

hasty removal of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a
small amount of distance (Heidegger, 1994, p. 5). Or even more memorably: Small distance is not already nearness. Great distance is
not yet farness (Heidegger, 1994, p. 5). None of this should come as a surprise to readers of Being and Time, where Heidegger observed that the
eyeglasses on my face are further than the acquaintance I see approaching on the street, since the glasses are usually ignored as long as they are clean
and in good working order. Distance

is not a discrete physical span, but refers primarily to distance

and nearness for human concern. Yet even nearness to human concern is not true nearness: for Heidegger, a stop-action film
gives us no true nearness to the growth of plants. If we call something near when it is a small physical
distance away, or instead call it near because it is an immediate object of our concern, in both cases we
make the same mistake: we reduce the thing to its presence-at-hand. Though the phrase presence-at-hand was no
longer used in 1949, it is still what Heidegger means. True nearness to the thing comes not from making it as
close as possible in physical or mental terms. Instead, true nearness requires distance. True
nearness and true distance are one and the same. The inability to let anything be distant from us is what Heidegger
calls the distanceless, or das Abstandlose. Everything dissolves together into a uniform lack of distance (Heidegger, 1994, p. 6). And this leads to one of
Heidegger's major technical terms pertaining to technology: The distanceless is never without a stance [Stand]. It stands, insofar as everything present

standing reserve is without distance, without true

nearness, and is ontologically identical with what was earlier called presence-at-hand. It may be a more politically
sinister form of such presence than most, but it should be remembered that
technology for Heidegger is already present in human history long before steamships and computers appear. All science is ruled in advance
is standing reserve [Bestand] (Heidegger, 1994, pp. 256). This

by technologya forgetting of the hiddenness of being and a reduction of things to their presence or outward look. Insofar as being itself must be
manifested in some form of oversimplified presence, it is even the case that being itself can be held responsible for the era of technology.

Technology turns everything into an accessible surface, devoid of distance. At times Heidegger
also shows the disturbing tendency to treat all technology as the same. This can be seen in his claim that the explosion of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima
four years earlier is not so important, since the real disaster happened long ago when being was forgotten in favour of presence (Heidegger, 1994, p. 6).
Or, even more controversially: Agriculture is now a motorized nourishment industry, essentially the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers
and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the fabrication of hydrogen bombs (Heidegger, 1994, p. 27).
In this way, all objects are reduced to a single mournful feature: their superficiality in comparison with the withdrawn depth of being

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Guilt
The Affirmatives Action is Motivated by a Guilt that Identifies Greater
Management as the Solution to the Problems Generated by Mismanagement
This Technological Thought Only Re-entrenches Impacts.
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pgs.8-9)

by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of

guilt. we are not placing ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its ugly consequences. On the contrary. we are
simply reasserting our technological dream of perfect managerial control . How so'?
Our guilt professes our' enduring faith in the managerial dream by insisting that
all problems - problems like oil spills. acid rain. groundwater pollution. the extinction of whales. the destruction of the ozone. the
rain forests. the wetlands - lie simply in mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to manage
ourselves in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves that if we had used our power to manage our
behavior better in the first place we could have avoided this mess. In other words, when we
Therefore. when we react to problems like ecological crises

respond to Heidegger's call by indulging in feelings of guilt about how we have been treating the object eanh. we are really just telling
ourselves how truly powerful we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could have done differently; we had the power to

we are in yet a new and more

stubborn way refusing to hear the real message. the message that human beings are not , never
have been. and never can be in complete control. that the dream of that sort of managerial
omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger warns. Thus guilt - as affirmation of human
agential power over against passive matter - is just another way of covering over the mystery. Thus
guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings are
finite and that we must begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain
total control. Guilt is part and parcel of a managerial approach to the world
make things work, if only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying

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Economy
The Affirmatives use of the economic control, with its use of production and profit, are
a prime example of neo-technik mindset set on controling the world. This will make it
IMPOSSIBLE to EVER have a different mindset infused with the plan.
de Beistegui '97
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel, Heidegger and the Political, ed. by K. Ansell-Pearson and S. Critchely, p.71, ASG)JRC]
What monstrousness does Heidegger have in mind here? In what sense can technology be declared monstrous? And why associate technology with
nihilism? At this stage, nihilism

can only be envisaged in the most simple sense, and that is as a phenomenon linked to the
effects produced by global technology. Following Jungers descriptions of the age of the Worker, Heidegger provides his most
economic description of the actuality of nihilism in section XXVI of Overcoming Metaphysics. Technology defines the way in
which the world, perceived solely as extended space, is mobilized, ordered, homogenized
and used up so as to enhance mans will to hegemony. The ordering takes the form of a total planning or an equipping
Rustung), which consists in the division of the whole of being into sectors and areas, and
then in the systematic organization and exploitation of such areas. Thus, each domain has its institute
of research as well as its ministry, each area is controlled and evaluated with a view to assessing its potential and eventually calibrated for mass
consumption. Resources

are endlessly extracted, stocked, distributed and transformed, according

to a logic which is not that of need, but that of inflated desires and consumption
fantasies artificially created by the techniques of our post-industrial era. Beings as a whole have
become this stuff awaiting consumption. Nothing falls outside of this technological organization:
neither politics, which has become the way to organize and optimize the technological seizure of
beings at the level of the nation; nor science which, infinitely divided into ultra-specialized subsciences, rules over the technical aspect of this seizure , nor the arts (which are now referred to as the culture industry); nor
even man as such, who has become a commodity and an object of highly sophisticated technological
manipulation (whether genetic, cosmetic or cybernetic). The hegemony of technology, which can take various forms according to the domains of
being it rules over, seems to be limited only by the power of its own completion. It is, for technology, a question of organizing the
conditions of its optimal performance and ultimate planwhether these be the
totalitarian or imperialistic politics of yesterday, the global economics and the new world order of
today, or the uniformalized culture and ideology of tomorrow. Yet behind this seemingly ultrarational organization rules the most nihilistic of all goals: the absence of goals . For why is
such an ordering set up? What are all those plans for? For the sole sake of planning. For no other purpose than
the artificial creation of needs and desires, which can be fulfilled only by way of an increase in
production and further devastation of the earth. Under the sway of technology, manthe man of
metaphysics, the rational animalhas become the working animal. For such a man, there
is no other truth than the one that produces results, no other reality than that of use and profit. His
will, this very will that constitutes his pride and that he erects as an instrument of his
domination over the whole of the earth, is nothing but the expression of the will to will .
Yet what this man does not realize is that his labor and his will spin in a vacuum, moving him ever more forcefully away from his provenance and his
destination, from his position amidst beings and from the relation to being that governs it. Busy as he is at using up and producing, at manipulating and
consuming, todays man no longer has the eyes to see what is essential (namely presence in its epochal configuration) and can no longer greet the
discrete echo of presencing which resounds in thinking and poeticizing alone. At best is he in a position to accumulate experiences (Erlebnisse), which
he flaunts as his truths.

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Fiat
Debate relies upon an assumption of givenness which creates a faade of knowability
related to empirical events, but this knowledge causes us to reward our own narcissism
and encounter the world as ready-made for our consumption. The theoretical
foundations of fiat simplify create a technological mindset in the round.
Seigfried 1990
[Hans, professor in the Department of Philosophy at. Loyola University Chicago, Autonomy and Quantum Physics: Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Heisenberg, Philosophy of Science 57, pp. 619-630]
But, of course, Heidegger's (early) analyses do not disprove the Nietzschean claim that we ourselves are not such that we always already are and remain
what we are, nor that the whole world of experience is the product of our organization and grounded in our form of life and "behavior". On the contrary,

the whole point of his lengthy phenomenological, existential, and fundamental-ontological

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

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Renewable Energy (1)

Promotion of renewables increases consumption by making it appear to have no costs,
this is technological thought
The Guardian 95
(Guardian is a news source from the United Kingdom)
And there's the rub. Benign is often in the eye of the beholder. A good number of sustainable

thinkers, for example, support the

use of eco-friendly devices such as solar panels, compact fluorescent light bulbs, and hydrogen-powered cars. Not Sale.

"The most
troubling threat from an energy resource like hydrogen is that it would work. We would have free, cheap, abundant energy. I can't think of a fate that
would be worse! All of the things that energy can do - digging up, paving over, pulling down - will be done at a much greater rate than we do them now,"
he says. "At

the heart of technological society is not technology but production and

consumption. So unless we break the shopping spell cast by our economy," he argues, "machines that save energy or
cut pollution are simply discount coupons that extend our spree for several more
decades until warehouse Earth runs out."

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Renewable Energy (2)

Storing energy from alternative sources is simply exploiting nature at our every whim
Beckman 2000
(Professor of Philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics., http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html),
00 (Emeritus , Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvey Mudd College
Tad , )
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different
human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent
with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in

modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand
that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such ." {[7], p. 14} Modern
technology sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a
bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely
decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The

rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys

an atmosphere of violence and exploitation. To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover why
technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must understand why modern technology must be

viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has
technology really left the domain of techne in a significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement
and, instead, acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors? Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as
symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new
character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the
wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to
store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored
in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be
turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged
into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit." {[7], p. 14} This and other
examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and

by placing nature in our

subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all
revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs.
modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved

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Solving Catastrophe
Seeking "solutions" to the "catastrophe" and "destruction" of the status quo reeks of
technological thought
Dreyfus 93
(Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p.304)
Nevertheless, although Heidegger does not deny that technology presents us with serious problems, as his thinking develops he comes to the surprising
and provocative conclusion that focusing

on loss and destruction is still technological: "All attempts

to reckon existing reality ... in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely
technological behavior" (QCT 48; TK 45-46). Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must
be solved by appropriate action is technological too: "The instrumental conception of technology conditions every
attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology.... The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the
more technology threatens to slip from human control" (QCT 5; VA 14-15 ). Heidegger is clear this
approach will not work. "No single man, no group of men," he tells us, "no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and
technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the atomic age" (DT 52; G 22).

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Opposition to Technology (1)

Attempts to speak out against technology are self-defeating because they replicate
rather than resist the essence of technological lineage as a wholethe affirmative only
traps us within an ontology that denies personal responsibility
Hershock 99
(fellow in the Asian Studies Development Center at the East West CenterPeterReinventing the Wheel 99 fellow in the Asian Studies Development
Center at the East West Center, (Initials))
(Peter, Reinventing the Wheel, p. 272-282)
Of course, we would like to think otherwise. We would prefer our "enemy" to be somewhere "out there" and not within ourselves as constitutive values of
who we have come to be and how--a function of our own karma. We would like to be able to blame someone or something objective for our dramatic
impoverishment and the fragmentation of our communities--someone or something we could battle and defeat. But in a thoroughly dramatic and
interdependent cosmos, matters can never be so clear-cut. As Hui-neng forcefully informs us, " If

you see wrongs in the world, it

is your own wronging that is affirmed. We are to blame for the wrongs of others just as
we are to blame for our own" (Platform Sutra, chapter 36). We are not in a position, then, to absolutely condemn our technological
lineage. If the perspective we have been exploring on technology is accepted as a valid one, our dominant technical orientation has been wrong. It has
disposed us to ignore interdependence in the promotion of individuality and independence, to forfeit our capacity for dramatically fruitful appreciation
for the factual payoff of control. But precisely because all things are interdependent, our technological lineage can only be relatively wrong. While it may
amplify the conflicts obtaining among our most cherished personal, political, cultural, economic, and religious values, our technological lineage does not
create those conflicts. Where our technologies lead us astray, it is because we are in a very real and tragic sense simply chasing our own tails. As Huineng reminds us, the wrongs we identify "out there" also reside and originate "in here." Because it would quite literally be self-defeating, a general
condemnation is not in order. So what do we do? If we accept the need to realize meaningful solutions to our troubles and not merely factual ones, and if
we accept the role of our current technical orientation in institutionalizing our incapacity for dramatically resolving our problems, how are we to
proceed? We can begin formulating an answer to this question by clearly perceiving that neither of the two most popular strategies for technological
reform are finally workable: first, the direct and often violent opposition to the spreading use of the tools generated by particular technologies and the
practical capacities they afford us; and second, the attempt to redefine our purposes for using these tools and to promote the technologies of which they
are a part on revised political, economic, and societal grounds. According to the first strategy, the responsible technological revolutionary is obligated to
overtly and even zealously attack the technological edifice our society has erected in celebration of its own core values. This can be as relatively benign as
the "monkey wrench" sorties of environmentalists who spike trees to render them unsuitable for industrial logging or who repeatedly disable earthmoving equipment at dam or mining sites. At its most extreme, this strategy results in a Unabomber-style terrorism and all that goes along with it. The
other approach is to gradually "redirect" our technical tradition, adapting it to the needs of a truly multicultural world that endorses only the most
neutral and universal human or even planetary values. This typically takes the shape of either a grassroots revolution--a "greening" of our technical
tradition--or a purification process by means of which we collectively and consciously take control of our technical destiny. An example would be to
promote the use of the World Wide Web as a means for virtually maintaining continuity within and between diasporic communities. On the one hand,

to declare open warfare on our technological nemesis, and on the other to

try our best to peacefully win it over to our side. Both approaches are self-defeating for the
simple reason that they replicate rather than resist the basic values underlying our
technological lineage as a whole. By confusing technologies with tools and the
commercial systems that produce and distribute them, both strategies are conducive to
a failure to realize that when we are most openly and deeply engaged in direct, technical revolt or
reform, our attention is almost exclusively attached to and so promoting the very
values we are ostensibly working against. In the same way that we can't fight fire with fire without getting hot, we can't
then, our approach has been

"take on" or battle patterns of conduct or narrative movement oriented according to the values of `control', `independence', and `individuality' without
becoming literally involved with them. Granted the Buddhist understanding of consciousness as given directly in relationship and of personhood as
narration, becoming

involved with protesting our technological lineage is at once speaking

out against and speaking out on behalf of it. That is the irony of all nonconformity-a commitment to darkly mirroring
that against which we ostensibly rebel. And so, it is not the "sold-out collaborator" who ends up most clearly evidencing this paradoxical conformity with
"the enemy," but the single-minded terrorist. The tragedy of all terrorist movements is that a total and even profoundly visionary dedication to bringing
some system of political, economic, social, or religious "oppression" to its knees amounts finally to an inverted form of worship. By spending all of his or
her material, temporal, intellectual, emotional, and attentive resources on destroying some "nemesis," the terrorist not only keeps it constantly in mind
but starves every other aspect of his or her narration. The true terrorist has no personal life-meaning a life devoid of intimacies, of aesthetic endeavor, of
free and creative community-and cannot but live in isolation and anonymity. Dramatically impoverished to such an extent that their life has but a single
purpose, a single focus, the terrorist suffers a tragic blindness to everything but what they aim to destroy and what might help in that mission. Terrorism
is impossible without a practiced ignorance of interdependence. Although it's often remarked in defense of violent and terrorist forms of resistance that
we can--and sometimes, can only--fight fire with fire, it is seldom acknowledged that this tactic works only when very controlled burning is used to take
fuel out of the path of an approaching blaze. If the fire cannot cross this "empty" space, if the availability of fuel can be limited, the blaze will be
contained. Since the basic resource or fuel of the colonization of consciousness is attention as such, however, this is a tactic doomed to failure. Regardless
of how things might at first appear, sacrificing

all our attention to blocking the advance of the

technological "firestorm" is only to be absorbed into it and make it burn that much
more brightly.
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Opposition to Technology (2)

Basic patterns of behavior and modes of living are the problemnot the lack of
reforms-- our "sincere" attempts to destroy our mechanisms and institutions for
control only refine and intensify those very hungers and habits
Hershock 99
(fellow in the Asian Studies Development Center at the East West Center, 1999 (Peter, Reinventing the Wheel, p. 272-282)

Protesting a dam here and a microchip factory there might put some local "flames" out, but
as long as the values of our social, political, economic, scientific, and religious traditions remain unchanged, the fire
will not be eradicated. In the same way that we cannot say "where" a fire goes when it blows or burns out, but rest assured that it will
reappear as soon as conditions permit, we should realize that though we can stop using certain tools and even
undermine certain technologies, as soon as conditions ripen --most crucially the experiential condition of
wanting--technologies aimed at increased control will flare back up. Like the mythic knot of Gordius, the
tangled karma of the control-mediated satisfaction of our wanting is in full public view, and yet, no matter how hard we try, we will never tease it apart
directly. The very hope of mastering our situation and so controlling the network of intentions and ac tions that have conditioned its arising is in actuality

Far from loosening the knot, our "sincere" attempts to destroy

our mechanisms and institutions for control only refine and inten sify those very
hungers and habits. But trying instead to simply limit or "green" these mechanisms and institutions,
while it may slow the rate at which our "Gordian" knot grows, is in the end no less self-defeating. Neil Postman's suggestion
just a deeper aspect of that same network.

that we regain control of our technologies is a general statement of this strategy of "winning over or reforming the enemy." More practically formulated
but no more productive of a true alternative to our technological lineage are Ivan Il lich's various appeals for establishing vernacular versions of the
technologies associated with economic and social development. For example, he has ar gued that developing countries should regulate vehicular design to
insure that the means and rate of transportation remain conducive to local self- determination. By only building trucks or lorries capable of a maximum
of twenty miles per hour, it is possible to ensure that as a society we will not cross the velocity threshold beyond which per capita, per day travel time in creases with every increase in average vehicular speed. Doing so also ensures that transportation systems can be locally maintained by semiskilled work ers. Because the tolerances of an engine designed for relatively low power output are so much more relaxed than those required for sophisticated, highperformance engines, it is possible to disintermediate parts brokers and factory repair shops through the on-site fabrication of replacement parts. These
are reasonable responses to a perceived need for placing brakes on our "technological juggernaut." They will not, however, result in a break in our
technical orientation and so a break in the predominant direction of our personal and communal conduct. Indeed, such responses appeal to precisely the
kind of rationality and prejudice against the unexpected that helped establish and maintain the prolific successes of our technological lineage as a whole.
If we are to cut through the knot of our technology-driven conduct, we must resist the temptation to try teasing it apart and extracting whatever is still
useful the "safe" tools and "useful" patterns of behavior. Instead, we must direct our attention, our energy, somewhere else entirely.

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Energy (1)
The Affirmative's ontology is a distinctive mode of revealing the world as standing
reserveit defines and orders nature as "energy," an orderable, controllable, and
usable commodity that serves human use while denying alternative ways of knowing
Smith 91
(Gregory, Department of Poly Sci @ Univ. of Michigan, "Heidegger, Technology, and Postmodernity," Social Science Journal, Vol 28, Issue 3, p.
ebscohost)
Heidegger argues that the traditional ways of conceiving technology are inadequate. Neither the anthropological view that technology is one form of
human activity among many (e.g. including also praxis and theoria), nor the instrumentalist view that technology is a neutral tool, a means to an end that
can be calculated and controlled by conscious human direction, grasps the essence of modern technology.(n23) For Heidegger, technology is a distinctive
way of revealing or relating to Reality. As such it is never simply under conscious human control, for technology's distinctive mode of revealing Reality
always stands prior to any conscious act taken on the basis of what is already revealed. And technology cannot be just one among many neutral kinds of
behavior in which man engages. As a mode of revealing of Being, it is the most essential behavior of man. For Heidegger, the essence of being human is
qua the being who is the site for the revealing of Reality. For the Greeks, techne is a form of poiesis or making. Techne, in its original Greek signification,
brings forth into existence that which does not bring itself forth. For the Greeks this is what differentiated it from physis or Nature, which is selfpresencing. But modern technology constructs a novel relation between techne and physis. The modern understanding of techne is not differentiated
from premodern techne by its greater power or precision. It is, according to Heidegger, qualitatively different. Modern
revealing that is a "challenging forth" rather than any simple apprehending or combining of natural givens in novel ways. It

technology is a
sets upon

Nature, unlocks it, exposes it, and challenges it to do man's bidding. Matter is transformed from its
natural state and kept in the ready in its new state until it is needed by modern industry. For example, matter is transformed into
energy which is stored and kept "standing by" for future use manipulation and
ordering. Modern technology takes what is, transforms it and keeps it in "standing reserve" until it is wanted. This is what differentiates modern
technology for all past poiesis. All of Reality is transformed into standing reserve (Bestand). That into which Reality is transformed is eventually (as
energy) no longer present to man in any way. Reality conceived as standing reserve, as malleable, transformable and capable of being stored in different
states than it is found and will eventually be used, reveals Reality to man in a way that is entirely different than as object (Gegenstand), that which stands
over against a subject. Now a situation occurs where nothing stands in any sense. The world ceases to have any "otherness" for man; Reality dissolves
into a variety of abstractions; nothing is present; there is no here here. Only

by initially treating Reality as object can

modern science so set upon the world that it can transform it into standing reserve. The
irony is that in the process objectivity dissolves completely.
Modern objectification transforms itself into the loss of the world. When this happens, the subject--which initially projected objectivity--no longer has
any place to stand. In the account of Being and Time modern man is "everywhere and nowhere."(n24) Without its object, a subject no longer has any
Being. The lack of a "there" yields what the early Heidegger called inauthenticity, characterized in part by "ambiguity" (as to the where of our existence),
"idle talk" (love of the superficial play of surfaces), and an aimless, superficial "curiosity."(n25) In the more poetic account of Heidegger's later work,
modern man becomes homeless; he loses all rootedness in his native surroundings. (n26) Heidegger is explaining how modern man comes to find
himself in a position of groundlessness and rootlessness in the modern age. The world disappears in the objectlessness of standing reserve. Needless to
say, Heidegger does not see going back to objectification as an alternative. That revelation of Reality necessarily transforms itself into the more radical
technological revelation in which the concrete world dissolves. First the real presents itself as man's idea, as something that has no self-sufficiency and
no capacity to ground itself. This projecting

or "enframing" (Gestell) of Nature transforms itself into

standing reserve. Reality comes to be understood as primarily determined by such
abstract categories as "capital" and "energy." Reality, in being transformed into something abstract, becomes
simultaneously something absent. Absence takes precedence over presence in our lives.(n27) Whether we are talking about modern physics or price
theory, the technological approach to Reality sets itself up to see how nature responds when challenged and conceptualized theoretically. If the response
is "positive," that specific form of challenging is projected as Reality. If not, another attempt is made. But as life becomes more abstract and as the world
becomes more absent it is difficult to know how to evaluate the competing conceptualizations: what constitutes "positive?" Hence the process of
challenging becomes self-generating without any external referent, without rhyme or reason. We get greater and greater technical and organizational
sophistication as ends in themselves.
Eventually man too becomes standing reserve, for in the late modern age man Is incapable of differentiating himself from the rest of Reality. In the late
modern age, there is no way to relate to the essence of the human as something distinctive. Man too is challenged forth--organized rationally and
bureaucratically--and calculated as an abstract integer qua productivity, unemployment, demographic shifts, population statistics, etc. Man reveals
himself as something maximally useful when properly ordered, arranged and propitiously "sallied forth." We cannot rebel against this technological
revelation of Reality for we ourselves are revealed to ourselves and understood by ourselves in the same way. We have no alternate place to stand
whereby we

could take up a critical attitude toward the technological revelation of Reality

as standing reserve. Consequently, modern technology is no mere instrumentality that
man can consciously and rationally control by imposing "values" upon it. We stand within its
mode of revealing and cannot stand outside it.

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Energy (2)
The Affirmative's justification of "storable" energy resources, even "renewable" energy
resources, reveals the world as objects, as being relevant only to human subjective
needs
Beckman 00
[Tad, Prof of Philosophy @ Harvey Mudd College, "Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,"
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html]
Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the
transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy
resources, as we would say. (7) As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other
manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution.
Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The

this storage the powers of nature can be

turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming
of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now
reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit." {[7], p. 14} This and other examples that Heidegger
used throughout this essay illustrate[s] the difference between a technology that diverts the natural
course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not
only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective
context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as
being relevant only to human subjective needs.
significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of

Technological thought that relies on the storable nature of energy resources reveals
nature as standing reservethis results in an active form of domination
Beckman 2000
(Tad, Prof of Philosophy @ Harvey Mudd College, "Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,"
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html)
The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding
nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything
that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing,

technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered

nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in
reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where
it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they
reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or
airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that
represents a consistent direction of domination . Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its
natural objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydroelectric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were
relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued

objects lose their significance to anything but

their subjective status of standing-ready for human design. (8)
elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing,

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Sustainability
The very idea of sustainability, of being able to limitlessly consume, alienates us from
the earth. It is a rationalization for the endless expansion of control- even into space
Peters 02
(Michael, is Research Professor of Education at the University of Glasgow and holds a personal chair in Education at the University of Auckland and
Ruth Irwin is a Bright Futures and Ryoichi Sasakawa Scholar from New Zealand/Aotearoa Ecopoetics, Heidegger and Dwelling p,
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v18.1/peters_irwin.html).

the question of sustainability. Arguably, it has already become

integral to the enframing of technology, and is no longer a notion on the fringe of politics and radical consciousness. The question of
There is a sense that we are already moving on from

how to change peoples consciousness in regard to sustainability is almost an historical issue. It has always had an element of historical reckoning. The
question invoked by Heidegger and his Earthsong commentatorsBate and Haaris whether there has been, or can be, any agency involved, or if the
change in public awareness arises of its own accord.? In any regard, the projection of sustainability into the future may have some surprizing
directions. Obviously, sustainability

has been made an issue of consumerism and a topic that capitalism must
address. Many people have relied rather lazily upon the possibility of the technological fix
to environmental problems. Indeed technology may fix sustainability, not heal it, but
rather fix in the sense of make static, retain, position, conserve, regenerate, and nourish the resource base of capitalism. This is the
eschatological trajectory of technological enframing. The end of history with the calculable technicity of supreme rationality and the
relegation of Earth to a recyclable, renewable, and, ultimately, replaceable resource. It is no longer an issue of how to convince people to accept and
promote sustainability, but of whether human control, often in the guise of liberal rationalism, will ever again ascertain an earthly wonder last promoted
by the Romantics. Or, if the demise of romanticism in the proliferation of corny paintings and films of the last frontier, will only be refound in new
frontiers, new planets, new solar systems to terra-form in exchange for the homely, if exhausted, ground of this one.

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War Representations
Representation of war is a technological process designed to lay siege to our senses and
condition us to accept violence
Kroker 04
(Arthur Kroker is a cultural theorist and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory at the University of Victoria, Canada (Arthur,
http://www.massivechange.com/ArthurKroker.html, Initials)
What does it mean that war is now mediated through technology?
Today not only the act of war itself, but also the

perception of war is a technological event. In a significant way,

there are always two theatres of war: actual battlefields with real casualties and immense suffering, and
hyperreal battlefields where the ultimate objective of the war machine is to conquer
public opinion and manipulate human imagination . Particularly since 9/11 and the prosecution of the so-called
war on terrorism, we live in a media environment which is aimed at the total mobilization of
the population for warfare. For example, in the American homeland, mobilization of the population is psychologically conditioned
by an image matrix, fostering deep feelings of fear and insecurity. This is reinforced daily by the mass media operating as a repetitionmachine: repeating, that is, the message of the threatening terrorist Other. For those living in the
increasingly armed bunker of North America and Europe, we dont experience wars in any way except through the
psychological control of perception through mass media, particularly television. The delivery of weapons themselves
intensely sophisticated forms of technology are part of the same system. So tech-mediated war is the total mobilization
for warfare with us as its primary subjects and targets.

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Knowledge-Production/Science
Knowledge production is just tool of production
Heidegger 59
(Martin, An Introduction to Metaphysics, P. 46-50)

the reinterpretation of the spirit as intelligence, or mere cleverness in examining

and calculating given things and the possibility of changing them and complementing them to make new
The crux of the matter is

things. This cleverness is a matter of mere talent and practice and mass division of labor. The cleverness itself is subject to the possibility of
organization, which is never true of spirit. The attitude of the litterateur and esthete is merely a late consequence and variation of the spirit falsified into

The spirit is falsified into intelligence thus

falls to the level of a tool in the service of others, a tool the manipulation of which can be taught and learned. Whether this
use of intelligence relates to the regulation and domination of the material conditions
of production (as in Marxism) or in general to the intelligent ordering and explanation of
everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism) or whether it is applied to the organization and
regulation of a nations vital resources and race in any case the spirit as intelligence becomes
the impotent superstructure of something else, which, because it is without spirit or even opposed to the spirit, is taken for the
intelligence. Mere intelligence is a semblance of spirit, masking its access.

actual reality. If the spirit is taken as intelligence, as is done in the most extreme form of Marxism, then it is perfectly correct to say, in defense against it,
that in the order of the effective forces of human being-there, the spirit, ie intelligence, must always be ranked below healthy physical activity and
character. But this order becomes false once we understand the true essence of the spirit. For all true power and beauty of the body, all sureness and
boldness in standing, are grounded in the spirit and rise or fall only through the power or impotence of spirit. The spirit is the sustaining, dominating
principle, the first and the last, not merely and indispensible third factor. As

soon as the misinterpretation sets in that

degrades the spirit to a tool, the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion,
become subject to conscious cultivation and planning . They are split into branches. The spiritual world becomes
culture and the individual strives to perfect himself in the creation and preservation of this culture. These branches become fields of free endeavor,
which sets its own standards and barely manage to live up to them. These standards of production and consumption are called values. The cultural
values preserve their meaning only by restricting themselves to an autonomous field: poetry for the sake of poetry, art for the sake of art, science for the
sake of science. Let us consider the example of science, which is of particular concern to us at the university. The state of science since the turn of the
century it had remained unchanged despite a certain amount of house cleaning is easy to see. Though today two seemingly different conceptions of
science seem to combat one another science as technical, practical, professional knowledge and science as cultural value per se both are moving
along the same downgrade of misinterpretation and emasculation of the spirit. They differ only in this: in the present situation the technical, practical
conception of science as specialization can at least lay claim to frank and clear consistency, while the reactionary interpretation of science as cultural
value now making its reappearance seeks to conceal the impotence of the spirit behind an unconscious lie. The confusion of spiritlessness can even go so
far as to lead the upholders of the technical, practical view of science to profess their belief in science as a cultural value; then the two understand
eachother perfectly in the same spiritlessness. We may choose to call the institution where the specialized sciences are grouped together for purposes of
teaching and research a university, but this is no more than a name; the university has ceased to be a fundamental force for unity and responsibility.
What I said here in 1929, in my inaugural address, is still true of the German university: The scientific fields are still far apart. Their subjects are treated
in fundamentally different ways. Today this

hodgepodge of disciplines is held together only by the

technical organization of the universities and faculties and preserves what meaning it
has only through the practical aims of the different branches. The sciences have lost
their roots in their essential ground. Science today in all its branches is a technical,
practical business of gaining and transmitting information. An awakening of the spirit
cannot take its departure from such science. It is itself in need of an awakening. The last
misinterpretation of the spirit is based on the above-mentioned falsifications which represent the spirit as intelligence, and intelligence as a serviceable
tool which, along with its product, is situated in the realm of culture. In the end the spirit as utilitarian intelligence and the spirit as culture become
holiday ornaments cultivated along with many other things. They are brought out and exhibited as a proof that there is no intention to combat culture or
favor barbarism. In the beginning Russian Communism took a purely negative attitude but soon went over to propagandist tactics of this kind. In
opposition to this multiple misinterpretation of spirit, we define the essence of the spirit as follows (I shall quote from the address I delivered on the
occasion of my appointment as rector, because of its succinct formulation): Spirit is neither empty cleverness nor the irresponsible play of the wit, nor
the boundless work of dismemberment carried on by the practical intelligence; much less is it world-reason; no, spirit is a fundamental, knowing resolve
toward the essence of being. Spirit is the mobilization of the powers of the essent as such and as a whole. Where spirit prevails, the essent as such
becomes always and at times more essent. Thus the inquiry into essent as such and as a whole, the asking of the question of being, is one of the essential
and fundamental conditions for an awakening of the spirit and hence for an original world of historical being-there. It is indespensible if the peril of
world darkening is to be forestalled and if our nation in the center of the Western world is to take on its historical mission. Here we can explain only in
these broad outlines why the asking of the question of being is in itself through and through historical, and why, accordingly, our question as to whether
being will remain a mere vapor for us or become the destiny of the West is anything but an exaggeration and a rhetorical figure.

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Hydroelectricity
Technological modes of thought challenge and provoke entities into disclosurethe
disclosure of the river as the "energy" of the hydroelectric power station is the ultimate
demonstration of technology's call on nature as standing reserve
Foltz 95
(Bruce, Prof of Philosophy @ Eckerd College, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature, p. 9)
''Technology, however, is not only a way of revealing. In disclosing entities, it also involves an establishment and determination of their being."

Challenging and provoking entities into disclosure, it delimits the manner in which
they can be present. As revealed by technology, entities are manifest by what Heidegger calls "stock" or "standing reserve" (das Bestand).
In a technological age, the very being of an entity is to be on call as a resource or
standing reserve, to be "in stock" for further disposal ; the being of entities thereby consists in their constant
availability to ordering and delivery. As an example of this, Heidegger proposes a comparison between the old wooden bridge built into
the banks of the Rhine and the hydroelectric power station into which the river is dammed up.
Whereas the bridge, through joining its banks, took its being from that of the river,
"what the river is now, namely a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence
of the power station." Granted that the river is now a standing reserve of hydroelectric energy, is it not still a river that is part of the
landscape as well? "Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group delivered there by the vacation industry.
"z0 There are various ways of being a resource.

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Body Counts
The aff's cost-benefit analysis is exactly the type of technological thought that leads to
our impacts
Shrader-Frechette 97
[ONeill Family Professor at Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame; Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Windsor.
Technology and Values, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.]
As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that
focusing on loss and destruction is still technological. All

attempts to reckon risking realityin terms of decline

and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior.
Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must be solved by appropriate action
turns out to be technological too: The instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the
right relation to technology The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology
threatens to slip from human control. Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work. No
single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no
conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of
history in the atomic age. His view is both darker and more hopeful. He thinks there is a more dangerous situation facing modern
man than the technological destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something can be doneat least indirectly. The
threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition
from which we can be saved. Heideggers concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather
than the destruction caused by specific technologies. Consequently, Heidegger distinguishes the current problems
caused by technologyecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism , etc.from
the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems. What threatens man in his
very nature is theview that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the
human conditiontolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. The greatest danger is that the approaching tide of technological revolution in
the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative

accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.

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Security
Security necessitates endlessly expanding threats in order to justify its own existence.
Calculative thought leads to increasingly large-scale war on difference.
Mitchell 05
[Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume
35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 181-218]

The uniformity of beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonment of Being, in
which it is only a matter of the calculable security of its order, an order which it
subjugates to the will to will, this uniformity also conditions everywhere in advance of all
national differences the uniformity of leadership [FiihrerschaAlj, for which all forms of government are only one instrument of
leadership among others. (GA 7: 93; EP, 108; tm) Government and politics are simply further means of
directing ways of life according to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician, should be able to alter these carefully
constructed ways of life. Ways of life are themselves effects of the plan, and the predominant way of life today is that of an all-consuming Americanism.
National differences fall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded, can only appear as commodified quaintness. All governments
participate in the eradication of national differences. Insofar as Americanism represents the attempt to annihilate the "homeland," then under the aegis

The loss of national differences is

accordant with the advent of terrorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds but,
rather, threatens difference and boundaries as such. Terrorism is everywhere , where
"everywhere" no longer refers to a collection of distinct places and locations but instead to a "here" that is the same as there, as every "there." The
threat of terrorism is not international, but antinational or, to strain a Heideggerian
formulation, unnational. Homeland security, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it
claims to protect, is nothing opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its
threat. Our leaders, in their attempt to secure the world against terrorism, only serve to
further drive the world towards its homogenized state. The elimination of difference in the
standing-reserve along with the elimination of national differences serve to identify the threat of
terrorism with the quest for security. The absence of this threat would be the absence of being, and its consummation would be the
of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms of leadership become Americanism.

absence of being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If a threat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then there is no
need for security. Security

is for those who know they can be injured, for those who can be
damaged. Does America know that it can be damaged? If security requires a
recognition of one's own vulnerability, then security can only be found in the
acknowledgment of one's threatened condition, and this means that it can only be
found in a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the threat. For this reason, all of the planned
securities that attempt to abolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Security requires that we preserve the
threat, and this means that we must act in the office of preservers . As preservers, what we are charged
to preserve is not so much the present being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thing means to not
challenge it forth into technological availability, to let it maintain an essential
concealment. That we participate in this essencing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is no isolated subject in
preservation, but an opening of being. Heidegger will name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrhet) of being, and it is this clearing that Dasein preserves
(bewahrt). When a thing trutlfulyl is, when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings, Dasein participates in the truth
(preservation) of being. The

truth of being is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Dasein
preserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization of being. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses to abolish
terrorism. For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remain skeptical of all the various
measures taken to oppose terrorism, to root it out or to circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do away with
what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degree willful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can
only draw out more and more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being maintains itself in a neverending supply. The will can only devastate the earth. Rather than approaching the world in
terms of resources to be secured, true security can only be found in the preservation of
the threat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security measures and the
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frantic organization of resources that we directly assault the things we would preserve .
The threat of being goes unheeded when things are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried,
monitored, and surveilled. The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowed to
rest. In the notes to the "Evening Conversation," security is thought in just such terms: Securi_y (what one understands by this) arises not from
securing and the measures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itself made superfluous by this. (MA 77: 244)23 The rest in
question is a rest from the economic cycling and circulating of the standing reserve. The
technological unworld, the situation of total war, is precisely the era of restlessness ("The
term 'totality' says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto known into the 'restless"' [GA 69: 181]). Security is superfluous here, which is

Utility and function are

precisely the dangers of a c'vil that has turned antagonistic towards nature. In rest, they no longer
determine the being of the thing. In resting, things are free of security measures, but not for
all that rendered insecure. Instead, they are preserved. There is no security; this is what we have to preserve. Heideggerian thinking
is a thinking that thinks away from simple presence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls "the between" (das Zwischen).
This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence. Annihilation is impossible for
this world and so is security. The terror experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of being.
The world is denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the danger
only ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence to escape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But security
cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Dasein guards the truth of being in the experience of
terror. What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being calls for terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of
being and the circulation of standing-reserve, what is has already been destroyed.
Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point . As we have seen, being does not linger behind the
scenes but is found in the staging itself. If being is to terrorize-if, in other words, this is an age of
terrorism-then being must call for terrorists. They are simply more "slaves of the history of beyng" (GA 69: 209) and,
only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in utility, but in the preserved state of the useless.

in Heidegger's eyes, no different from the politicians of the day in service to the cause of Americanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are

both politicians and

terrorists are called for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence, that
the plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensure its nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into
circulation by the threat of destruction. In this regard, "human resources" are no different from "livestock,"
and with this, an evil worse than death has already taken place. Human resources do
not die, they perish.
murderers and the politicians are not. Granting this objection despite its obvious nalvet6, we can nonetheless see that

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***CALCULATIVE THOUGHT LINKS***

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Problem/Solution
The 1AC logic of problematizing the world and providing a solution engages in
technological thinking that enframes things as problems or solutions, degrading
everything on earth to something of calculative value.
Korous 97
(Become What You Are, p, 19,George, Yale Law Graduate, Copeland . )

Problemization is very similar to Heidegger's understanding of truth as a process of revealing and concealing. Heidegger is mainly concerned
with the way in which technology problematizes the world, which, as Heidegger notes, is not a benign description of reality, but rather a
construction tied to technological thinking. "Such analyses of the 'situation' do not notice that they are working only
according to the meaning and manner of technological dissecting, and that they thus furnish to the technological consciousness the historiographical-

The legitimacy of calculative approach

to a "situation" are guaranteed in advance by Enframing: the "problem/solution"
framework is a rigged game in which technological solutions are accepted at the outset
because of their ontological relation to the representation of the problem.
technological presentation of happening commensurate with that consciousness".

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Morality (1)
The Affirmatives Attempt to Repent for our Wrong Doings on EarthThis
Justifies and Continues the Calculative Thoughts that First Generated These
Wrongs
McWhorter 92
Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. viii)
The first essay, "Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection." gives an overview of Heidegger's thinking on technology
and discusses Heidegger's call for reflection as opposed to instrumental or calculative thinking about the earth. It carefully distinguishes reflection.
in Heidegger's sense. from moral stock-taking or ethical judgment. In fact, it suggests that moral

discourse and practice

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

Thus, our tendency to feel guilty about our treatment of

the earth is not a change of heart but is rather a perpetuation of human domination
moral guilt are reinstantiations of the calculative.

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Morality (2)
The affirmatives call for a moral obligation is doesnt work since that morality
is a universal code established by the government meant to control the people
Szabo 02
[Matt Szabo, PhD Candidate in Geography at The University of Manchester, Managerial ecology: Zygmunt Bauman and the gardening
culture of modernity, Environments, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2002, p. proquest]
With a slight shift of emphasis, Bauman argues, the challenge of the Holocaust to law or right is deafening ... The good citizen may
henceforth be he or she who stands against the diktats of compulsory Gemeinschaft. As Hannah Arendt argued, in effect, it now became
incumbent upon us to contemplate the problem of moral responsibility for resisting socialization (Beilharz 2000: 102-103).
The Holocaust therefore serves as a focal point for Bauman's arguments regarding the danger of modernity's privileging of institutionally
derived ethics before and over the moral impulses of individuals or civic (i.e. non-state) social groupings. As Beilharz goes on to observe, a
basic sense of right or wrong -- which Bauman (1993) aligns with innate moral capacity as opposed to institutionally constructed ethics -may well precede socialization. However Beilharz, a sociologist, shies away from exploring the implications of this essentialist potentiality, or
considering what this acknowledgement of non-social factors implies for social-constructivist thinking in general. Instead Beilharz insists
that morality is invariably grounded in the social realm, his point being that the social construction and mediation of morality/ethics can
mean completely different things depending on the motivations of the determining social group in question:

The ordinary relativism in morality generated by communal difference does not

apply to the human capacity to differentiate between right and wrong . Something must
on this account, precede socialization or the conscience collective; and this is why solidarity as such is not a good thing, but can be good or
bad, as social solidarities can be constructed for different reasons and put to different ends ... Moral

capacity, in this sense,

must be located in the social, but not the societal sphere; or it must be practised in the
realms of civil society rather than in the state. Morality results from being with
others, not from rote instructions or code lists; we may find morality acted out
within institutions, but it does not originate within the loci of such structures (Beilharz 2000: 103).

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Privatization
Private actors fail the codes of business ethics under which they act turns
employees into tools
Ladkin 06
(Donna, PhDProfessor in Leadership and Ethics @ Cranfield School of Management
When Deontology and Utilitarianism Aren't Enough: How Heidegger's Notion of "Dwelling" Might Help Organisational Leaders Resolve Ethical Issues
Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Apr., 2006), pp. 87-98) JM
Limitations of current approaches to Business Ethics In contemporary times, business ethics has largely come to mean adherence to codes of practice,
or the development of those codes of practice. Accordingly, business

ethics has come to be associated with

bureaucracy, systems whose intent is to control, delineate, or prescribe behaviors . As Cummings

(2000) points out, these conceptions of business ethics have their legacy in the Enlightenments project of objectification, rationality, and the pursuit of
meta-narratives unaffected by context. Ethics

born of this approach are, paradoxically, in opposition to what many of us know

the modern world of organizations to be that is, post-modern; in which meanings are constantly shifting, in which we are encouraged to
acknowledge the plurality of stories informing organizational life, and wherein no one
is believed to have an undisputed corner on truth. He notes the irony of the growth of business ethics literature,
and the proliferation of codes of conduct which are ever more lacking in meaning for the world in
which we operate. Elaborating on this idea he writes: many now regard the current codes that
constitute peoples appreciation of what business ethics amounts to, as so general as to
be meaningless as a guide to practical action in a fast changing world characterized by
unique situations, why ethics is of little use in the development of company strategy
(except in the restrictive sense) why many see business ethics as only being cynically or
instrumentally adhered to on an as needed basis (213). This view is supported by the kind of response often
evoked by organizational leaders encountering the topic of business ethics. From their perspective, initiatives to make them more aware of the need to
adhere to certain codes of practice can seem irrelevant in the face of those situations which truly test their ethical sensibilities. The following case study
illustrates such a scenario and the issues it raises. The details of this actual case have been altered in order to preserve the anonymity of those involved.

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Power (1)

The Affirmatives defense of power creates the conditions for oppression and
devastationall beings become subject to violent calculation and planning
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, ]
Heidegger now develops an extensive interpretation of this essence and its implications (for a clear summary, see especially GA 69, 57). Power has
become the contemporary meaning of being: beings are now essentially manifestations of power and occasions for the use of power (Dallmayr 2001).

Power seeks to overpower itself, overcoming its current level and increasing without
limit as it mobilizes everything, subjecting all beings to it (GA 66, 6263, 176; this interpretation of power
stems from Heideggers reading of Nietzsches will to powersee Nietzsches Metaphysics, in Heidegger 1987, 19596). This is the metaphysical root of
contemporary phenomena such as the totalthe imperialthe planetary (GA 66, 18).
Heidegger expands the Contributions concept of machination and uses it to indicate the makeability of beings, that makes and makes up everything
(GA 66, 16)that is, the fact that beings appear as manipulable and producible objects. Machination empowers overpowering as the essence of power.

The drive for overpowering creates oppression and devastation (GA 66, 20). Heidegger gives
devastation a new meaning: it is not the destruction of objects, but the undermining of
the possibility of decision: beings no longer come into the decision of being (GA 69, 48). We
might hear an echo here of Kierkegaards critique of the present age: essential relationships have been reduced to a reflective tension which leaves
everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it
supplies a secret interpretationthat it does not exist (Kierkegaard 1962, 4243). Power

thus destroys everything

inceptive and all worth (GA 69, 74). It creates a total organization without true
commitment (GA 69, 83). Under the sway of this organization, all beings and acts are
viewed as subject to calculation and planning. However, the plans bring themselves into a wasteland that they cannot
control, and necessarily run into the incalculable and unforeseeable (GA 69, 84).
Power manifests itself as both planetarism and idiotism, where the first is the tendency to extend the rule of power over the entire Earth, while the
second is a self-centered subjectivism that is turned in upon what is peculiar to it (idion)

yet views all individuals through the

same lens of the essence of modern subjectivity (GA 69, 74). The planet, we might say, is becoming one huge, greedy,
anonymous subject. Heidegger resurrects a famous term from Being and Time and claims that this idiotic subject is the unconditional essence of the
they in the history of be-ing (GA 70, 35).

This violence becomes a

brutality that turns not only against other brutal forces but ultimately against itself (GA
69, 7677). To call such machination evil would be to evade the genuine horror of it: it
dissolves the very standards of good and evil, the very concept of a final goal (GA 69, 217).
Heidegger is talking about political power, of course, but also about how being itself is
manifested in terms of power, in everything from science to art. (Art is reduced to propaganda and kitschGA 66, 31, 17475; the
ideal of manliness becomes a muscle-bound figure with an empty, brutal faceGA 66, 34.) Even specifically political
phenomena must be understood from a metaphysical, not political point of view (GA 69, 66).
Power knows no goals or standards other than itself; as violence, it uses itself to enhance itself (GA 69, 22, 75).

So Heidegger attributes little responsibility to dictators; we live under the dictatorship of power itself (GA 69, 20), not of persons such as Hitler. The

Those who appear

to be free because they are powerful are in fact enslaved to power and warped by an
interpretation of selfhood in terms of power. Because power destroys all moral and
legal standards, the age of power must include the planetary criminalsunnamed individuals who Heidegger says can be counted on the
fingers of one hand (GA 69, 7778). Their destructiveness bursts the bounds of ethical judgment and
legal punishment; even Hell and the like is too small for them (GA 69, 77).
Power does not belong to the powerful tyrants, then, but neither does it belong to the
people. The public face of power, its propaganda and pageantry, presents the power as
belonging to society at large; but this socialism covers up the fact that the people is
actually disempowered (GA 69, 82). The capacity for decision is obliterated by an atmosphere of declarations and commands (GA 66,
19); these create only a fanaticism that seizes on a ready-made appearance of salvation (GA 66, 119). Political action is then
40
so-called possessors of power cannot in fact get power within their graspinstead, power possesses us (GA 69, 6364).

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nothing but calculating how to mobilize the masses as a whole (Heidegger n.d., IX, 58a) or the total
planning of life that is directed to self-securing (GA 69, 100). The youth is particularly used and abused by this
process, because young people are sufficiently ignorant and shameless to carry out the
planned destruction without question (GA 66, 19). This entire so-called struggle is only
the evasion of the questionability of be-ing (GA 66, 141).

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Power (2)
The Affirmatives concern for preserving power reduces global beings to makeable,
replaceable resources
Polt 7
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]

The new war is a world war inasmuch as the world in the Heideggerian sensethe
whole of meanings and purposes that orient Daseinis now intelligible only in terms of
power (GA 69, 18081, cf. 50). Power has taken over the play of the world (GA 69, 182) or the play of
being (GA 69, 186). Beings have been reduced to makeable, replaceable resources;
everything is planned, calculated, producible. Our relation to beings has become
readiness for engagement: we are human resources, ready for productivity (GA 69, 185).
(The contrast to Heideggers eagerness for engagement in 1933 could not be clearer.)

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Transport
The Development of Transport Creates Logic of Independence from the Earth that
Justifies Manipulation of the World
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. 1)

the
invention of the automobile, then the airplane, and now our various vehicles for travel in
interplanetary space; the conquering of distances that has accompanied the development of communications technologies such as radio, television,
and film, and of course, the changes in our thinking of and with the natural world that have come
as we have become seemingly more and more independent of the earth's forces, more
and more capable of outwitting them and even of harnessing them and forcing them to
conform to our wills. These changes - but more especially human beings' unreflective incorporation of these changes into our daily
lives - struck Heidegger as strange and very dangerous. It may well be that there is nothing really wrong with using a tractor
to plow one's land or with using a computer to write one's book, but there is something ominous, Heidegger believed, about
our not giving any thought to what is happening to ourselves and to the world when we
do those things, or our not noticing or at least not caring about the disruptions these changes bring about in the fabric of things. Heidegger calls
Heidegger often refers in his writings to the dramatic changes to which he was witness - the loss of rootedness to place that came with

us to give thought to - or give ourselves over to thought of - the strangeness of our technological being within the world. His works resound with calls for
human beings to grow more thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon where we are and what we are doing, lest human possibility and the most
beautiful of possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not understand and only pretend we can count on.

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Democracy (1)
Democracy and liberalism are merely forms of totalitarianism and metaphysical
communism we should seek knowledge without utility that remains within the event of
being
Polt 7
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, ]
From this perspective, world wars are only interludes in a more essential process (GA 69, 187); the essence of power far exceeds military and political
categories. Heideggers suprapolitical perspective views totalitarian

and democratic systems as essentially the

same. Both are based on an idea to which reality must conform (such as the idea of democracy or the
idea of the people); both are subject to the illusion that power rests with the people (the majority, the race), when in fact, power can
belong to no one (GA 69, 18889). The competing interests of the world powers, which they
try to defend by launching mass wars, are epiphenomena of metaphysical power (GA 69,
2067, 210).

It may seem that dictators have power, but in fact they themselves are dominated by the
process of power. This process overwhelms the current rank of the despot, as every
stage of power is only a stage to be overcome; the power process also demands a
uniformity of all beings, thereby destroying the distinctive status of the so-called
powerful individuals (GA 69, 190). The only-a-few (GA 69, 19394) are then not so different from the never-too-many (GA 69, 190).
The elite are bound together only by their anxiety in the face of any possible obstacle to
the constant growth of power (GA 69, 19395). Heidegger sees this elite as anonymous, and proposes in the Draft that even
Stalin is only their front man (GA 69, 203). The meaning of the title Koinon emerges when Heidegger focuses on a metaphysical analysis of
communism. As he had commented in a lecture course a few years earlier, the Platonic concept of essence as the universal or koinon is relatively
superficial: the fact that a number of beings have a characteristic in common is only a possible consequence of their essence (GA 45, 6061). (For
example, what makes a tree a tree is not its similarity to other treesit would still be a tree even if it were the only one in the world.) Yet the superficial
interpretation of the essence as a universal has become dominant in Western thought, and has encouraged us to view thought itself as generalization.
This metaphysical

communism assimilates everything to the common and eliminates

the incomparable. Our age is communist in this sense, and in this sense communism is the completion of metaphysics in its

meaninglessness (GA 69, 37, 191, 201).

Communism, as Heidegger understands it, is not a strictly human affair (GA 69, 195). But he does relate his metaphysical communism to communism as
political practice: the Soviet regime reduces everything to the average and interprets Dasein in the reductive terms of work, use, and enjoyment. The
Communist Party and its ideology impose a uniformity of proletarian attitudes and behavior (GA 69, 19192). Ownership disappearsnot only in the
legal sense, and not only in regards to material property, but in regards to the self, which is plunged into anonymity (GA 69, 195). The particular
destinies of peoples are ignored; the reliability of beings is destroyed (GA 69, 196).
Soviet Communism cannot be overcome by a supposedly more spiritual understanding of the human condition. Communist materialism is itself
thoroughly spiritual, in that it is a product of Western metaphysics (GA 69, 204). The very dichotomy between spirit and body must be called into
question; we can neither affirm spirit in an empty, unquestioned sense nor turn the body into an article of faith for a worldview (GA 69, 206).
What could defeat communism? Heidegger now has little or no hope that National Socialism can overcome it. Race and its cultivation are just more
subjectivist power-concepts determined by modernity (GA 69, 223). As for Anglo-American liberalism, Heidegger sees it as little more than a hypocritical
communism wearing the masks of Christian and bourgeois morality.

Liberalism must be annihilated if modernity is

to be overcome (GA 69, 2089). Communism can be defeated only by itself: incapable of rising to the level of the history of be-ing, it will
annihilate itself by mobilizing for total war (GA 69, 20910).

Heidegger seeks a kind of knowledge that has no utility, but

remains within the event of being (GA 69, 197) and awaits the final god (GA 69, 21114).
Standing apart from this grim spectacle,

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Democracy (2)
Democracy is a way of ensuring rational conformity to authority
Polt 7
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf]

But any reader who hopes to see Heidegger draw closer to liberal or leftist points of
view will be disappointed. All political systems demand a blind faith in faith (GA 67, 115).
All ideology is a thoughtless vulgarization of the metaphysics of ideas that must ultimately be
blamed on Platos idea tou agathou (GA 67, 4041)and perhaps, in the case of liberalism and communism, on Judeo-Christian domination (GA 66,

He looks upon democratic idealism and cultural optimism with contempt (GA 66, 39
the common sense [Heidegger uses the English words] of the democracies as essentially identical to
the rational conformity to plan of total authority (GA 66, 234).
39).

40), seeing

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Environmental Protection
The call "fix" and "control" the ecological problems of the status quo are a form of
managerial control that necessarily reveals the earth as standing reservethis mode of
thought not only risks nuclear conflict and environmental catastrophe, but also leads to
the loss of our true relationship with the world
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Asst Prof of Philosophy @ Northeast Missouri State Univ., Heidegger and the Earth, p. 4-5)
What is most illustrative is often also what is most common. Today, on

all sides of ecological debate we hear, with greater

and greater frequency, the word management. On the one hand, business people want to manage natural
resources so as to keep up profits. On the other hand, conservationists want to manage natural
resources so that there will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These
groups and factions within them debate vociferously over which management policies
are the best, that is, the most efficient and manageable. Radical environmentalists damn both groups and claim it is human
population growth and rising expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen, we see and hear the term
management. We are living in a veritable age of management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school she or he is already preliminarily
trained in the arts of weight management, stress management, and time management, to name just a few. As we approach middle age we continue to
practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the pressures of life increase and the body begins to break down. We have
become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the

managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-dwellers we must ask, what does this signify?
In numerous essays - in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" - Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of
dangers in this, our, age. This

danger is a kind of forgetfulness - a forgetfulness that Heidegger thought

could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss
of what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in
thoughtful relationship to things.

The Affirmative's call to action in the name of averting ecological disaster is reflective
of a thoughtless and Western managerial approach that created such catastrophe in the
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first placeonly be questioning the "need to act" can we release ourselves from this
disastrous mode of thought
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Asst Prof of Philosophy @ Northeast Missouri State Univ., Heidegger and the Earth, p. vii-viii)
When we attempt to think ecologically and within Heidegger's discourse (or perhaps better: when we attempt to think Heideggerly within ecological
concerns), the paradoxical unfolds at the site of the question of human action. Thinking

ecologically - that is, thinking the earth in

our time - means thinking death; it means thinking catastrophe; it means thinking the
possibility of utter annihilation not just for human being but for all that lives on this planet and for the living planet itself. Thinking
the earth in our time means thinking what presents itself as that which must not be
allowed to go on, as that which must be controlled, as that which must be stopped. Such
thinking seems to call for immediate action. There is no time to lose. We must work for change,
seek solutions, curb appetites, reduce expectations, find cures now, before the problems become greater than anyone's ability to
solve them - if they have not already done so. However, in the midst of this urgency, thinking ecologically,
thinking Heideggerly, means rethinking the very notion of human action. It means
placing in question our typical Western managerial approach to problems; our
propensity for technological intervention, our belief in human cognitive power, our commitment to a metaphysics that
places active human being over against passive nature. For it is the thoughtless deployment of these
approaches and notions that has brought us to the point of ecological catastrophe in the
first place. Thinking with Heidegger, thinking Heideggerly and ecologically, means, paradoxically, acting
to place in question the acting subject, willing a displacing of our will to action; it
means calling ourselves as selves to rethink our very selves , insofar as selfhood in the West is constituted as
agent, as actor, as controlling ego, as knowing consciousness. Heidegger's work calls us not to rush in with quick
solutions, not to act decisively to put an end to deliberation, but rather to think, to tarry with thinking unfolding itself, to release
ourselves to thinking without provision or predetermined aim.
The notion of "solving" environmental "problems" spring from and conceal the
ontological desire to delineate and control Being
Langer 03
(Monika, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Eco-phenomenology : back to the earth itself, p. 106)
It is not surprising that environmentalists disagree so profoundly about the very meaning of nature. As Evernden points out, the concept of nature is
inherently volatile and ambiguous and can be used to demand or justify virtually all lifestyles and social goals. It "is also a mode of concealment, a cloak

the
notions of "environment" and "problem solving" spring from, and conceal, the dualistic
ontology which fuels that paranoid urge to delineate, delimit, and control Being. Thus the
very terms "environmentalism" and "environmentalists" actually encourage and
reinforce the rupture with, and reification of, Being, by implying that there is a world of
objects surrounding us. The idea of "environmental problems" or "solutions"
presupposes such an androcentric reification of Being .8 Despite these inherent difficulties and drawbacks,
of abstractions which obscures that discomforting wildness that defies our paranoid urge to delineate the boundaries of Being."7 Similarly,

environmentalism can contribute to phenomenology, as I will show in due course.

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Pacifism
Pacifism is a form of domination and orderingits no less machinational than world
war
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]
Heidegger broods on the coming war in similarly dark and metaphysical terms. The

ideologies of liberalism, fascism, and

communism are bound to clash, even though they are metaphysically the same: they
are all expressions of the overpowering essence of power, which requires the
invention of a planetary opponent (GA 66, 18, cf. 20). Such war does not rise above the enemy who is to be overpowered, but
sinks into the lowest level of opposition (GA 69, 153). This new, boundless kind of war makes the entire reality of a nation subservient to it (GA 69, 44).
But this is not to say that Heidegger is a pacifist. World

peace (in the Christian-Jewish-ambiguous sense) is no less

machinational than world war (GA 66, 28): both are attempts to dominate and order beings,
to make them available as exploitable resources. In our age, the significance of even the
most peaceful things lies in power and overpowering.
KO I N O N : ME TA P H Y S I C A L CO M M U N I S M
The essay Koinon: From the History of Be-ing and the Draft of this essay (GA 69, 179214) are noteworthy efforts to apply be-ing historical thinking
to the start of the Second World War (1939-1940). Heidegger begins Koinon with the strange character of the war, which at this stage did not have
constantly visible effects on everyday German life. The strangeness, he suggests, is a distant echo of the worth of be-inga questionability that lies
beyond the coming gigantic battles of annihilation (GA 69, 180). In this strange new form of war, the difference between war and peace evaporates:

peace becomes nothing but the domination of the means and possibilities of war (GA 69,
181).

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Transport
The development of transport creates a logic of Independence from the Earth that
Justifies Manipulation of the World
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. 1)

the
invention of the automobile, then the airplane, and now our various vehicles for travel in
interplanetary space; the conquering of distances that has accompanied the development of communications technologies such as radio, television,
and film, and of course, the changes in our thinking of and with the natural world that have come
as we have become seemingly more and more independent of the earth's forces, more
and more capable of outwitting them and even of harnessing them and forcing them to
conform to our wills. These changes - but more especially human beings' unreflective incorporation of these changes into our daily
lives - struck Heidegger as strange and very dangerous. It may well be that there is nothing really wrong with using a tractor
to plow one's land or with using a computer to write one's book, but there is something ominous, Heidegger believed, about
our not giving any thought to what is happening to ourselves and to the world when we
do those things, or our not noticing or at least not caring about the disruptions these changes bring about in the fabric of things. Heidegger calls
Heidegger often refers in his writings to the dramatic changes to which he was witness - the loss of rootedness to place that came with

us to give thought to - or give ourselves over to thought of - the strangeness of our technological being within the world. His works resound with calls for
human beings to grow more thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon where we are and what we are doing, lest human possibility and the most
beautiful of possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not understand and only pretend we can count on.

49

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Economy
Claims of economic survival only serve to hide the inherent technological process of
global domination and calculation of resources.
Joronen 2010
(Mikko, Doctoral candidate in Human Geography @ The University of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space Planetary System of Ordering, 2010
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf?sequence=1) JM

the metaphysical essence

of markets is to bring all beings into a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival between the
powers of business calculation. It is precisely because this survival is based on successful
accumulation and efficient commodification of beings, that under the contemporary global capitalism the
whole globe becomes conquered for its market. Under such economic malleability everything is established as producible
products and hence delivered to the markets in terms of growing efficiency and competitiveness. Out of the colossal competition between the
Under such colonization of calculable price mechanism, the whole globe eventually becomes an area of domination:

figures of calculation and machination, globalization turns into a struggle between different technological worldviews (Heidegger 1977d:134135; See
also Joronen 2008; Moisio 2008:8990). Globalization growing giganticism fuelled by the competition between powers of efficient manipulation
and survival a struggle to maximize the utility and control of beings under the pre-delineating framework of gigantic calculation are both
manifestations of the operational logic of technological Gestell. Consequently, economic

survival struggle and the

glorification of competitiveness hide the fact that they aim at massive ordering , thus admiring
the megalomania of endless growth and expansion. By penetrating and spreading, and hence, by turning all beings under the logic of technological
manipulation, the techno-capitalist logic of optimization of productivity and competitiveness that constantly seeks to open new markets by turning
things into products of profit making eventually present one of the ontic realities that have accelerated the globalization of Gestell.

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Technology
Technology Engages in an Ordering of All Activities that Maximizes Efficiency
Reducing All Being to a Question of Process and Efficiency.
Ilharco 03
(Assistant Professor for the School of Human Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal, The Globalization of Everything or Ge-stell by Other
Name: A Phenomenological Analysis of Information Technology., http://www.ucp.pt/site/resources/documents/FCH/F%20/site%20The
%20Globalisation%20of%20Everything_SPHS.pdf),
The technological is a deliberate grasping as a unity of the ways, both manual and mechanical, in which activities are performed. The technological does
not rely on the tradition of the many techniques. The logos of

technology relies on the ever more efficiency it

brings to human activities. The technical procedures must fit the criterion of being the most efficient way of achieving a result.
This is the ordering process towards an ever more efficient relationship of man to his
world; its tradition becomes its own path of efficiency. Heidegger (1977) indicates this course as the essence of modern technology. Heidegger (1977)
took Aristotles thesis of the four causes (Aristotle 1998) in order to de-construct causality, which reigns in the instrumentality that characterizes the
toolness of technology. He asks what unites the four causes from the beginning? (Heidegger 1977:8) He shows that causality is grounded on a revealing,
which in itself is a granting of the possibility of truth, of Wahrheit in German. This revealing is an already there that gathers the four causes of
occasioning, letting beings come into unconcealment, to presence as beings to be preserved (bewahren), to endure (whren), to be watched over and kept
safe (wahren), to be manifest (Wahrnis). Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing (Heidegger 1977:12). This way of
revealing is an ontological one because it does not only concern the beings that come into presence, a crafts work or a machine, but also and
fundamentally it is the disclosure of is-ness as such. The technological revealing is primarily and fore mostly the background against which appears that
which is. This ontological revealing is the fundamental nature of technology. Would this revealing be the essential nature of modern technology as well?
Heideggers (1977:14) answer is unambiguous: It too is a revealing. [A] tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now
reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as mineral deposit ( ). The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently
than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain (ibid.:14-5). Modern technology changes decisively the coming into presence
of humans, things, animals, tangibles and intangibles; of that which appears for man. A revealing not only reveals that which is differently, but also
reveals and conceals differently. Truth, meaningfulness, thus being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962) is differently grounded. There is nothing
metaphorical here. Modern technology changes substantively that which is decisive in-the-world. It lets unfold a whole conception of is-ness, engulfing
what-to-do/what-to-be, and appearing as a challenging. This challenging forth is a setting-in-order that sets upon nature. As a challenging-forth of

technology is always directed from the beginning toward driving on to the

maximum yield at the minimum expense (ibid.), that is, towards efficiency. In this way technology reveals a world of
nature,

resources. These resources belong to an already ongoing process, which essentially does not designate the dam, the hydroelectric plant, the machine, or

The
unconcealment that the technological revealing brings about is a particular standing in
which beings show themselves in their belonging to an efficiently ordering process. This is
any other typical technological object, because it rather chiefly designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences (ibid.:17).

for Heidegger what is most essential about technology. He calls it Ge-stell, enframing in Lovitts (1977) translation.2 In Ge-stell the real is revealed in the
mode of ordering; that is, enframing reveals, that which it reveals is ordering. Thus, the essential ordering element of Ge-stell is the very technological
nature of IT.

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The affirmatives attempt to further technology ignores the dangers of technological

development.
Housman and Flynn 11
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]

Our relation to technology has fundamentally changed over the past few centuries. Devices such as cell phones,
laptops, engines, and televisions all play major roles in our daily lives, to such a degree that it would be difficult
to imagine our world without them. The preponderance of these technological devices dominate our
lives so extensively that many believe we have become dependent on them, ignoring what it
means to be human and reducing our lives to mere cogs in a larger technological machine. This situation poses
a serious threat both to our essence as humans and to our surrounding natural environment. Indeed, since the time of the Industrial Revolution, our
environment has been exposed to rapidly increasing levels of greenhouse gases that present grave dangers to our glaciers, the survival of many species,
agricultural productivity, and our environment as a whole. We are living during a crucial historical period that will define the way we inhabit this earth
and our future survival.
It is with this backdrop in mind that we turn to the late work of the renowned German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heideggers philosophical pursuits
following World War II marked a shift in his thinking as he moved toward understanding technology and its position within society and the history of
man as a whole. Yet, even as Heidegger adjusted the focus of his philosophical lens to technology, the question concerning Being and the essence of man
continued to penetrate his work. What, then, was Heideggers philosophy of technology and how can it shed light on the threat global warming imposes
on our environment? After analyzing many of the main ideas from Heideggers later work on technology, this chapter will demonstrate that Heideggers

technology and the danger he calls attention to must be taken seriously if we wish to
preserve our natural environment and humanity. An appreciation for the gravity of this landscape that Heidegger
philosophy of

presents will hopefully inspire many to actand it is in this commitment to what Heidegger calls meditative thinking [ bessinnliches Denken], our
essential activity that has been overlooked in the surrounding technological world, that we will make great strides towards caring for our environment.
The spirit of Heideggers work calls for us to regain our essence as thought-worthy beings, and forces us to consider how we can live in a technological
world while also preserving our environmenthow we can say both yes and no to technology.

The affs technological mindset leads us to view nature as a standing reserve of

resources placed solely for our benefit
Beckman 2k
(Professor of Philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics., http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html),
00 (Emeritus , Humanities and Social Sciences at Harvey Mudd College
Tad)
The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding

modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far

removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not
only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of
nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of

nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We
pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations

Technology has
intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction
of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural
objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric power, as a water supply, or as an
around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes.

avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to
presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of
revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design.

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Globalization
The Affirmative's uncritical acceptance of the processes of globalization reflects a
flawed ontology that views the world in terms of calculative ordering
Joronen 10
[Mikko The Age of planetary space: on heidegger, being, and metaphysics of globalization, University of Turku, Turku 2010 MV]
From all of the ways modern technology has transformed us, the world, and the earth , spatial magnitude
may be the one having consequences most comprehensive and pervasive. In the appendix to one of his best-known essays, he Age of the World Picture,
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (18891976) describes

this technological transformation in terms of what has

the process of globalization, an increasingly spreading globe-wide
connectedness of things from societal practices to the use of natural entities. We are now faced with the planetary
imperialism of technologically organized man, Heidegger writes, with a technology of
organized uniformity that has become the surest instrument of total rule over the
earth (Heidegger 1977d:152). Although it has become somewhat self-evident that after a couple of decades of rapid intensiication this
technological conquest of planetary space has grown in monumental heights, it is equally apparent that the
issue of globalization is not solely emptied into recent speeding up of the loss of the sense of distance.
the globe rather seems to provide a symbol for an entire age of technological conquest
and ordering. In fact, it is this technological conquest, as Heidegger points out in his other much sited essay Question
Concerning Technology, which is not a mere order of a machine but a way of revealing, that constitutes an entire era of gigantic
enframing (Gestell) of the terrestrial globe, the planetary earth (1977a:23). In a fundamental
sense of the word, we contemporaries are being caught up in a cyber-world of the real, thrown into a world
governed by technical command revealing the whole of the earth as nothing but a
reserve on call for the networks of its commanding orderings. By implicitly indicating fundamental levelling and ever-heightening possession of
apparently become known as

the space of the earth, such ordering of things has turned the earth into a planetary resource to be used up by the manipulative powers of technological
societies. It

is this technological power, which evermore reaches ahead by calculating and

arranging things as functions according to its own ordering power that deines the

fundamental outcome of the technological revealing of planetary space: the uniform capturing and positioning of spatial relations of things into a
framework of total orderings.
What is peculiarly interesting in the former openings of Heidegger is that they present an ontological reading of the conditions, which made possible the
spatial revealing constitutive for the diversity set of contemporary globe-wide phenomena, in a context of their historical constitution. In spite of the
huge amount of literature, already among geographers, concerning the issues related to globalization processes, such an onto-historical reading of the
metaphysical underpinnings of our planetary age has been, unfortunately, almost conspicuous by its absence (See however Dallmayr 2001, 2005; Elden
2005a; Hetherington 2002; Joronen 2008, 2010; Kisiel 2001a; Ritzer 2003; Rose 2004; Ziarek 2004). In such an onto-historical reading what has
become a pale geopolitical fact a fact that has frozen itself even to spatial theories as one of the natural scales among others: the global scale is
cracked open for ontological exploration and historical destruction. In particular, Heideggers notions about the historical emergence of the manipulative
power of machination (Machenschaft) the possessive and coercive power (Macht) of ordering and technological enframing (Gestell) of things into
orderable and lexibly mouldable resources, insightfully articulate the emergence of historically and spatially signiicant moment of completion of the
whole tradition of Western metaphysics: its outgrowth in terms of planetary unfolding. he rise of planetary unfolding, thus, is neither contingent nor
historically unbound, but relects a series of historical transformations concerning our grounding understanding of things and their spatial nature. Such
emergence signiies, to be precise, a happening of historically and spatially signiicant moment of completion: an outgrowth of the metaphysical thinking
of early Greeks, especially their notion of tekhne, in terms of globally expanding systems of calculative and willfull orderings. As it is argued in the
present study, globalization

does not mark a mere re-scaling that takes place in contemporary

societal discourses and practices; it is rather based on a completion of the logic
intrinsic to Western metaphysical rationality, such completion taking place through the
onto-historical emergence of the calculative ordering making it possible for things to
relate to each other in an increasingly planetary way.

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Human Spaceflight
Sending someone into space destroys the idea that humans are inherently tied to the
earth as their home, that destroys being and devalues Earth
Turnbull 06
(Neil, The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global Being in the Planetary World, Theory, Culture & Society 2006 (SAGE, London, Thousand
Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 23(1): 125139, Project Muse MV)
Thus the modern astronaut is seen as one of the primary agents of modern worldlessness in Heideggerian philosophy (and one is immediately struck by
the phenomenological similarities between the spatial nihilism of Nietzsches madman and the free-floating placeless experience of the modern

when the earth is seen from an astronautic point of view, all traditional
human concerns are deterritorialized and strangely diminished to the extent that
interplanetary representations of the earth threaten to sever the connection between
humanity and its traditional ontological supports. Heideggerian scholars such as Robert Romanyshyn have
astronaut). For

developed this idea and used it as the basis for an existential critique of the mad astronaut: the quintessentially modern avatar that stands as the highest
expression of modernitys unheimlich rootlessness. Romanyshyns is a critique of what might be termed the astronautic condition of modernity (1989;
200), as, in Romanyshyns view, the modern astronaut what

so many modern Western children want to grow

up to be is a metaphor for a hypermodern cultural-psychological dream of distance, departure and
escape from matter that reveals a world of pure spectacular wonder, and that
disguises and perhaps even obliterates those deep and emotional connections to the
earth that maintain a sense of ontological security and lived reality.
These Heideggerian concerns are echoed in the claim that the planetary earth is a symbol of Western capitalisms
domination of nature and global exploitation of cultural life. Seen thus, the image of the earth from space can be seen
as the aesthetic core of the ideology of the expansionary neo-liberal phase of global capitalism and the sublime object of the post-ideological West. It
is an object that conveys a new satellite geography (see Redfield, 1996) and a placeless map that is the representational condition of possibility for the
establishment of global surveillance and communication systems (Western capitals command-and-control system). This placeless space of the planet is
seen as challenging traditional notions of space and perhaps even traditional conceptions of the real itself. And according to Paul Virilio, the
interplanetary idea of the earth is not only internally related to the idea of limitless capitalist expansion (see Virilio, 2002: 63) because, in his view,
planetary technologies are bringing about an exotic reorganisation of sight enabling perception to escape from the real space of our planet into what
he terms a horizonless perception under a vanished sky (see Virilio, 1997: 2, 2000: 63). Here, as with more orthodox Heideggerian analyses,

representation of the earth as planet is seen as a symbol of the deterritorializing

technological power of global capitalism: a power that renders the sphere of experience as a
synthesis of home and non-place, a nowhere place (Beck, 2002: 30).

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Solar Energy
The concept of "solar energy" is purely reductionistthe light of the sun becomes
merely kilowatt hours, units of measurement
Padrutt 92 (Hanspeter, Member of Daseinsanalystiches Institut, Heidegger and the Earth, p. 26)
A few years after the Americans landed on the moon, the Club of Rome published those famous computer predictions, entitled "The Limits of Growth,"
which showed that, if things continue the way they have gone on "spaceship earth," soon it could not go on. Better founded and more oppressing still was
the study commissioned by President Jimmy Carter, which appeared in 1980 with the title Global 2000 Study. Both studies are honest appraisals and
cautious predictions, which can shake up humankind. However, since they take for granted the basis of "world-models" or "spaceship earth," they can
also solidify the opinion that the world is a machine. Spaceship earth and the world model correspond to a worldview of objectifying subjectivism and are
snares along the way of descent from the throne of master and owner of nature. Actually the question emerges whether the objectifying reductionism of
natural science - which can be detected in many notions of the ecological movement - should not also become questionable for this movement.

As

sensible and correct as the demand to save energy is, still the concept of energy remains
reductionist and ambiguous, because it reduces the light and warmth of the sun, the waterfall in the
mountain stream, the roaring of the wind, the burning of wood, and the power of the horse,
reduces this whole world to kilowatt hours. Is it not noteworthy that the concept of energy comes from the way language
got used in the eighteenth century and, in the historical unfolding of being in this language, is connected with Aristotelian energeia, the work-character
of beings? Just as problematic as natural science's reduction of all beings in the concept of energy is, so too is the economic reduction of all beings to a
monetary value problematic. Certainly the proposals for economic decentralization and for the development of a softer technology made by the British
economist E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) are as relevant today as ever. Certainly the provocative theses of an Ivan Illich are in many
ways very pertinent. And probably an ecological economy will develop presumably in the direction of James Robertson's "alternatives worth living." But

one cannot overlook the fact that an ecological accounting still reduces things to a
monetary value and that many concepts of these authors are characterized by the economy of objectifying subjectivism, by a worldview of the
retailers - as, for example, the concept of a "qualitative growth."

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Warming
Pressures to "do something" about environmental issues such as species preservation
and global warming embody calculative ways of thought that bring greater
estrangement from Being and the destruction of any authentic relation with nature
Langer 03
(Monika, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Eco-phenomenology : back to the earth itself, p. 114-5)
For environmentalism, Heidegger's meaning of thinking and of language is particularly important at this time, as is his emphasis on wonder and
mystery. Given the increasing extinction of plant and nonhuman animal species, the rapid disappearance of habitats (including old-growth forests), the
growing mass of pollutants, the acceleration of global warming, and all the other pressing environmental issues, environmentalists may well feel

increasing pressures to "do something," and to wrap environmentalist concerns in the

prevailing, "calculative" way of speaking. Heidegger emphasizes that succumbing to such pressures
brings even greater estrangement from Being, and the destruction of any authentic
relation with nature. Instead, it is essential to cultivate receptivity to Being-all the more so, given the contemporary preoccupation with
commodification, control, and the quick fix. There can be no "fix" for environmental issues. Rather, there
must be a radical change in humans' relation with Being . As I noted earlier, such a
transformation cannot be willed-but it can be thoughtfully prepared. A first step lies in
recognizing that thought and language are internally related, and that they involve an
entire way of living. In the first part of this chapter, I drew attention to some eco-feminists' concerns about the erasure of nature's alterity
through the use of such representations as "home." These ecofeminist insights can make an important contribution to Heideggerian phenomenology by
questioning Heidegger's use of tropes, such as: "home," "homeland," "homecoming," "homelessness," "at home," "house," "neighbour," "shepherd,"
"farmer," "rootedness," "rootlessness."24 Could it be that these representations (of Being, of its relation to humans, and of humans' relation to Being)
erase Being's alterity? Despite his intentions and claims to the contrary, it may be that Heidegger's tropes subjectivize Being and make his
phenomenology anthropocentric. Further, environmentalists can question Heidegger's claim that the power of language distinguishes humans from
other beings.

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Terrorism
The attempt to stop terror is calculative in its nature, ignores being and fails
Mitchell 05
(Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University (Andrew J, Heidegger and Terrorism, Research in Phenomenology, Volume 35, No. 1,
2005, MV)
This does not mean that being exists unperturbed somewhere behind or beyond these beings. The withdrawal of being is found in these abandoned
beings themselves and is determinative for the way they exist. Heideggerian thinking, then, allows us to ask the question of our times and to think

the withdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism,

where beings exist as terrorized. Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum total
of activities carried out by terrorist groups, but a challenge directed at beings as a
whole. Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue, and it names the way in which
beings show themselves today, i.e., as terrorized. This "ontological" point demands that there be the "ontic" threat of real
terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorism also indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is destined to fail. Political
reactions to terrorism, which depict terrorism from the outset as a political problem, miss the fact that terrorism itself, qua
metaphysical issue,is coincident with a transformation in politics . That is to say, political responses to
terrorism fail to think terrorism . In what follows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking terrorism as a question of being
terrorism. My contention in the following is that

and sketch a few characteristics of the politicotechnological landscape against which terrorism takes place.

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Necessities
We must give up on modern philosophys insistence on the necessity of truth;
throughout the Enlightenment, this resulted in the denigration of the earth and all
things associated with its raw materialityemotion, passion, human finitude.
Nietzschean philosophys attempt to re-ground human meaning in the chaotic flux of
earthliness replicates the structure of Enlightenment thinking by insisting that
meaning is, by definition, grounded. Instead, to say with Nietzsche, in order to have
fidelity to the Earth, we must recognize that only Nothing can ground a meaningful
relationship to the Cosmos.
Turnbull 2006 [Neil, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Social Theory at Nottingham Trent University, The Ontological Consequences of
Copernicus: Global Being in the Planetary World, in Theory, Culture, Society 23]
Deleuze and Guattari stand out as the two philosophers who have provided the most systematic attempt to philosophize in a post-Copernican mode for
an age when the old earth has become what they term desert earth and the sense of a new earth has yet to be philosophically articulated. For them, the
issue of the

nature and significance of the earth remains one of the central concerns of
philosophy: but only when the idea of the earth is sharply differentiated from that of
territory. The earth for Deleuze and Guattari represents a utopia (see Goodchild, 1996) and
stands in stark opposition to the earth of English capitalistic expansion: the old Greek
earth broken, fractalised and extended to the entire universe (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 104). In their
view, Heidegger made the mistake of conflating earth and territory , for now the earth has become
something other than territory in its cosmopolitical separation from cartographic control. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, the
earth is [t]he Deterritorialised, the Glacial, the giant Molecule a body without
organs (1987: 40). The earth is thus not one element among other elements (1994: 85), fixed in
specific place in time under a specific sky, but a fluidity that brings all elements within
a single embrace (1994: 85). The earth is a space permeated by flows in all directions, free intensities and nomadic singularities (1987: 40).
When conceived in this manner, the earth is no longer conceived as a background but a destratified plane upon which all minds and bodies can be
situated. According

to them, the plane of the earth knows nothing of differences in level,

orders of magnitude, or distances (1987: 68); such codings can only come from the social
technological machinic assemblages that straddle and cartographise the earth . In
opposition to the idea of the coded earth, they offer an idea of the earth as decoded
and unengendered, an immobile motor, [s]uffering and dangerous, unique, universal
it is the full body and an enchanted surface of inscription (1983: 154). It is the single plane that escapes
the territorial codings of the modern nation-state, and is the extraterritorial grounds for thinking and acting beyond its remit. To conceive of the
earth in this manner requires a rejection of the basic assumptions of subjectivist modern philosophy
for when rendered earthly, thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a
revolving of one around the other, but something that takes place in a deterritorialized space between
territory and earth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 85). The implication of this claim is that the major issue
facing contemporary Western philosophy today is how to devise a philosophy that
interrogates and gives ontological sense to planetary deterritorialization the epochal
moment when the earth loses its ancient association with territory when, as Deleuze
and Guattari point out, philosophy itself is still territorialized on Greek soil, such that
Greece and ipso facto Europe is still the philosophers earth (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 86).
Clearly, this will demand a different set of philosophical ideals and vocabularies ones less grounded in narrowly defined ideas of earth as both terra
and its political corollary territory. Deleuze and Guattari note that, at

the birth of modernity, modern philosophy

turns back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth and a new people (1994: 99).
This new earth was the Copernican earth: the earth removed from its nodal position as
the ultimate ground of the Aristotelian universe and exploded into the universe while at
the same time being redefined and repositioned as one element of a wider heliocentric interplanetary system (the third stone from the sun). Its
continual movement and dependence upon much larger and scientifically more
significant interplanetary forces made it a poor candidate for certainty and necessity .
Grounds were thus located elsewhere by modern philosophers in more anthropological locations such as subjectivity, language and/or the hidden

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teleologies of history. It is only in the last century that such moves were exposed by the late
Wittgenstein and late Heidegger as metaphysical illusions as existentially pernicious as
the Aristotelian metaphysics that they replaced. But, in turn, the emergence of the planetary dimension to modern life
undermined their territorialized conceptions of philosophy, creating a hiatus in the history of Western philosophy (that some have mistaken for the end
of philosophy itself). However,

when this issue is conceived in a Deleuzian manner, philosophys

task is again to summon forth a new conception of the earth appropriate to the global
cosmopolitan age. This conception of the earth can longer function as an a priori cognitive self-justifying principle; for the global earth is a
dynamic and fluid largely oceanic earth where ground, sky and water converge to form a new planetary idea of the world (where the earth, as world,
is understood, in an Irigarayan manner, as largely air). But

this does not necessarily imply that planetary

representations are simply another imperialistic avatar that universalises loss of
meaning, the society of the void (Latouche, 1996: 73). No, for the new universal expresses a new
political imaginary outside the ideological strictures of the modern nation-state. It is
the condition of possibility for a planetary ideal of a new humanity the non-human
basis and destiny of every human that brings together the planets cultural and
ecological elements in a singular cosmological embrace (suggesting that both natural and cultural life are
holistically related as vibrant multiplicities). This is earth is not the hypermodern Copernican earth, where human values and vitalities are rendered
diminutive by the vast sea of darkness surrounding a blue and green point of unified, singular human space (Redfield, 1996: 258), but a dynamic and
open earth that is an expansive plane that brings all elements with a single plane of composition. It stands for the idea of a way of dwelling without
territory; an idea of global being for a new planetary Mitsein. This idea of the earth is also found in Indian philosophy especially in Vedic traditions
where the earth is conceived as the far-spreading one and a great wide abode (see Radhakrishnan and Moore, 1989: 1112). And, for Deleuze and
Guattari, this new earth requires a more topological articulation by a new kind of philosopher in their view the philosopher must become
nonphilosopher in order to make ultimate sense and significance of what might be the tao of globalisation (see Anderson, 2004: 77) and the last
universal: the planetary world that must be shared by all.

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Economic Leadership
American economic leadership necessarily spreads global devastation the antidote is
thinking
Laing 2010
[MA in Philosophy from York University, Ph.D. student (Tristen, Heidegger on Americanism and Democracy: in what way might the G20 exemplify our
lack of a homeland?, http://northernsong.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/heidegger-on-americanism-and-democracy-in-what-way-might-the-g20exemplify-our-lack-of-a-homeland/]
Devastation is not the physical breaking of people or things, but a malady of spirit or History. It is rather that which conceals home, which conceals the
inceptual. Devestation makes the world unworld. To put it in an everyday way of speaking annihilation destroys people and things, but devastation
sweeps away our ability to to recognize what people and things are it robs from us our ability to think according to our own histories and concepts. But
what role does our history play in judgement, in our ability to think? This is actually not difficult to explain: Western Civilization is built on values and
ideals most countries have constitutions which are understood as founding documents which lay out principles on which societal order is formed.
Thinking according to our inceptual home means something like thinking in the context of a history in which values and ideals play a certain kind of role.
To be devastated means for that role to be concealed, for us to lack the abilities to think handed down from history for us to lose track of the
historicality of our ideals in the history of spirit. For

devastation:

Heidegger, America plays an active role in the spread of

We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate [zuvernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means:
the inception of the Western world. The inceptual is indestructible [unzerstrbar] (GA 53: 68/54; tm).
This is confusing because Heidegger uses the word annihilate to mean what devastation means in the previous quote. The key is to recognize that
annihilation in this expression is not the annihilation of people or things, but the annihilation of the homeland, which for America is Europe and the
inception of the Western World. America attempts to be rid of its European heritage it thinks it can strike out on its own, but in fact, this is not
possible it remains tied to the indestructible inception from which it is born.
But what of concentration camps? For Heidegger, such camps or any other horror bestowed on the world in the early to mid 20th century are
themselves only examples of annihilation. And yet, at the same time, they all express the devastation which has befallen spirit in the age of technological
thinking. That devastation is only indirectly manifested in specific horrors, and not qualitatively more or less present in the Holocaust than in the
Atomic Bomb (it might be relevant to remember that the Atomic Bomb very much could have, and could still, end humanity it would be difficult to
claim that next to the annihilation of humanity the Holocaust remains an absolutely specific evil). This equivalent manifestation of devastation in
disparate annihilations is what makes Heidegger guilty moral equivalence, i.e. holding many incidents under the same standard.
The very notion of moral equivalence is an example of the devastation, of the annihilation of homeland, which we experience (or rather, fail to
experience) on a daily basis in modern corporate/liberal society. When Chomsky calls for the most basic moral principle, hypocrisy, be observed, and is
called a terrorist, our alienation from the inceptual Western homeland is extreme.
But what does devastation have to do with the G20? Certainly at the G20 summit many experienced the annihilation of basic rights and freedoms. At the
G20 detention centre many had police officers tell them there are spaces where your rights do not apply. This echos the logic of the free speech zone
at Queens Park an ominous assertion both given the recent history of the Chinese Protest Zones during the Olympics at Bejing, and the fact that
according to the Charter, Canada itself is a free speech zone.
But devastation our loss of homeland is not experienced in the taking away of rights, or in the G20 integrated security unit acting like Canada is a
Police State. No, the

devastation is experienced in the civil response, or rather, the lack of a

civil response to the abolition of peoples rights. It is a devastation because it expresses our lack of understanding of
our own ideals, their importance, and their force in legitimating a society which is substantially better than many others. Those ideals, although written
on a document brought home to Canada in 1982, have their origin in European traditions. The extent to which we lose touch with the importance of
upholding our ideals is the extent to which we choose to abandon them.
Principles are not to be universally adhered to principles exist for a reason, and if those principles no longer function to serve life, to serve society, then
those principles should be re evaluated and replaced. However, we should recognize that the moment our rights and freedoms can be taken away at a
moments notice for the convenience of a particular political regime is the moment when these rights are merely propaganda and tools of power to be
accorded and not accorded to various groups for particular ends. The

lack of appreciation of the historical depth of

such annihilations that took place during the G20 is symptomatic of the deep
devastation of Americanism.
The antidote to Americanism is nothing other than thinking thinking which appreciates the role of
principles and rights, thinking which evaluates the reality against the ideality of democracy, and a thinking which does not fall to the easy truisms and
simplifications of the corporate media.

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K Affs
Engaging one facet of inequality or oppression only replicates the harm- only the reexamination of being can prevent spirit murder and extinction. Trying to engage in only
one facet kills all thoughts of Being-in-the-world and is an example of the managerial
mindset of technik.
Spanos 2000
[Professor of English at SUNYBinghamton) 2k (The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/ Imagining the Shadow of
Metaphysics, William V. Spanos, boundary 2, 27.1 (2000) 169)//JRC]
And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collectively subsumed under the silence that belongs to the totalized saying privileged by a
metaphysical representation of being as Being, this

reconstellation also points the way that the rethinking or

retrieval of thinking (and poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the
world picture, which is to say, in the posthistorical age of transnational capitalism. In the
interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement of human lives
precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capitalist democracyand the utter
inadequacy of the Western interpretation of human rightsit is not enough to engage capitalist
economics or politics, or patriarchy, or racism, or classism, and so on. All these
pursued independently remain trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the
dominant discourse. In the interregnum, rather, the thinker and the poet must think the polyvalent
manifestations of the spectrality released by the consummation of the Pax Metaphysica if
they are to prepare the way for a politics that is adequate to the task of resisting the
impending Pax Americana and, beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-ended
agonistics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all those postmodern
critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of evil incumbent on the reduction
of being at large to a territory, planetary in scope, to be conquered, compartmentalized, and
administered. Which is to say on all self-righteous proclamations of universal peace that
justify the physical and spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

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Science
Modern science attempts to calculate and enframe objects by revealing them, causing
man to forget that concealing belongs with revealing. This forgetting is the ultimate
danger to Heidegger because enframing causes man to become a standing-reserve
unable to encounter or realize himself
Cario 09
(Jovito V., PHILIPPINIANA SACRA, Vol. XLIV, No. 132 September-December, 2009 pp. 491-504 Heidegger

and the Danger of

Modern Technology, Enframing and the History of Western Thought The Danger of Modern Technology) JM
Human subjectivity as mere calculation of objects first displays itself in the appearance of modern
physics as a modern science. Modern sciences way of representing, according to Heidegger,
pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of objects. 27 The description modern, Heidegger further
added, points not so much to the sciences application of experiments on nature but to modern sciences penchant to set up
nature that it may be calculated in advance. It is in this sense that modern physics is the herald of
Enframing, 28 and as the essence of modern technology, enframing starts man upon the way of that
revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing reserve .
Enframing is a mode of revealing that challenges forth and orders. As a mode of revealing, enframing also belongs to destining, to Geschick. Man also
belongs to destining because he is the one who listens and hears but once he opens himself to the essence of modern technology, he can be swayed to
the pursuit only of what is revealed in the sense of ordering and challenging forth. In such an event, the other possibility of belonging to what is
unconcealed is also blocked. Even this, says Heidegger, is part of the destining of man and part of the destining of all coming to presence. Following
the Greeks, Heidegger maintains that: That which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway become manifest to us men only later. 30 In
another essay, Heidegger describes that which manifests itself only later as the inaccessible and not to be gotten around. 31 That is how what is
concealed reveals itself to us as a concealment that unconceals itself in revealing and a revealing which remains concealed in unconcealment. The

Modern manthough ,through the enchanting effect

of modern technology, has been fixated merely with what is revealed . It is this penchant for what is
revealed that deceives man to believe that he can grasp everything or to use Mcwhorters expression, manage everything. 32 When we
delude ourselves this way, we forget not only ourselves but the passing of
unconcealment itself. Such forgetting is an element of what Heidegger points out as danger. What is
two elements, concealing and revealing, always go hand in hand.

such danger? I shall explore Heideggers answer to this question in the third part of this paper. The Danger of Modern Technology. In the destining
that destines both man and Enframing, two possibilities come to fore: first, the possibility of man pursuing nothing but what is revealed in ordering
and challenging forth; and second, the possibility of the blocking of man from being admitted to what is unconcealed and apparently, given the
contemporary mans obsession to rule and control the mega-energies of nature. It seems that the former possibility is the one holding sway.

Since nature is seen as a storehouse of resources, mans relation with it is reduced in

terms of management. Earths resources are a plenty hence the necessity of
management as a strategy for domination and control, but the more he tries to manage everything, the
more man distances himself from what is essential. What makes the situation doubly unfortunate is that this
fact is hidden from man himself, that is, the fact of his belonging to what is concealed .
McWhorter writes: The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then , in what it knows not in its penetration into the secrets of
galactic emergence or nuclear fission but in

what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other

truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever
beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can never manage
everything. Mans belonging to what is concealed although oftentimes forgotten by man
himself is within the destining of man, the same destining which introduces itself to
man as danger. It is danger or as Heidegger calls it, danger as such because once the destining of revealing holds sway, man can turn
away from what is unconcealed by reducing it to what is calculable and can be represented. Heidegger calls this representation of the unconcealed
correct determinations. 36 Further, Heidegger holds that God himself is not free from this representational thinking. He is invariably called the
cause or causaefficiens or whatever is convenient for those who think they exalt God by domesticating him in their own categories. As pointed out by
Heidegger, the determinations may be correct but in the midst of these correct formulations, the danger can likewise persist, that in the midst of all

Man encounters the ultimate

danger when the destining holds sway in the manner of Enframing. Heidegger calls it the ultimate danger
because in its holding sway, Enframing does not only reduce objects as standing-reserve, as
that is correct the true will withdraw. However, this is not yet the ultimate danger for Heidegger.

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the orderer of the standing-reserve, man himself is reduced to the status of standingreserve. This leads to what Heidegger characterizes as the ultimate delusion which
man experiences when he stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth
of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see
himself as the one spoken to and hence, also fails in every way to hear in what respect
he exists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus
can never encounter himself.

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***IMPACTS***

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National Security = War

Technology goes hand in hand with the enframing militaristic force of nation states that
devalues human beings and refuses to recognize their own substance.
Burke 07
(Anthony, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations @ The University of New South Wales Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and
Reason, War as a Way of Being: Lebanon 2006, 2007 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/10.2burke.html)
This essay describes firstly the

ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas
and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry
Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and
justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody
and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing'
image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use, control
and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power
to hurt'. The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the
linear system of effects imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could
meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain
and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms, the arguments of Hannah
Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel)

20

Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on
added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in
war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'.

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Brink Now
Technological thought is taking over now, rejection is key
Shrader-Frechette 97
[ONeill Family Professor at Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame; Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Windsor.
Technology and Values, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing.]
As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that
focusing on loss and destruction is still technological. All

attempts to reckon risking realityin terms of decline

and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological behavior.
Seeing our situation as posing a problem that must be solved by appropriate action
turns out to be technological too: The instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the
right relation to technology The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology
threatens to slip from human control. Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work. No
single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no
conference of leaders of commerce and industry, can brake or direct the progress of
history in the atomic age. His view is both darker and more hopeful. He thinks there is a more dangerous situation facing modern
man than the technological destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something can be doneat least indirectly. The
threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition
from which we can be saved. Heideggers concern is the human distress caused by the technological understanding of being, rather
than the destruction caused by specific technologies. Consequently, Heidegger distinguishes the current problems
caused by technologyecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism , etc.from
the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems. What threatens man in his
very nature is theview that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the
human conditiontolerable for everybody and happy in all respects. The greatest danger is that the approaching tide of technological revolution in
the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative

accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.

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***TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT IMPACTS***

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Calculability Internal Links

Technological thought is ontologically violent and makes calculative modes of thinking
inevitable
Botha 02
(Catherine, Dept. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Pretoria, Heidegger, Technology and Ecology, South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol 22, Issue 2, p.
ebscohost)

Technology is ontologically devastating, because it usurps all other modes of revealing.

With every thing standing in reserve for our use, distance disappears (Heidegger, 1993:331).
Here, Heidegger is referring to distance as an existential sense of our proximity to horizons: those between earth and sky, mortals and immortals8. This
blurring of borders is the main indicator of an unchecked anthropomorphism. This anthropomorphism that objectifies the world in order to exploit it is
also one that creates the world in its own image, where everything that human kind comes into contact with be - comes an extension of itself. Yet, human
being as Dasein necessarily inhabits a there and so can never encounter only herself (Heidegger, 1993:332). Since human being is a thinking being-inthe-world, a situated and limited being, Heidegger can claim that the

ultimate victory of technological human kind

is a delusion. Its sovereignty would, however, not be any less catastrophic, because delusion may become accepted as reality. Human nature
and human freedom, in Heidegger's special sense of the word (1993:3 30), still lie in the balance.
The Danger The

danger, therefore, is for Heidegger not the potential physical self-annihilation of humanity, but rather that intensive
technological production will over power human's capacity for diverse modes of
disclosure. Philosophic thought would be replaced with utilitarian cognition ; artistic creativity
would atrophy as a result of endless innovative production, and political action would be obviated by social engineering. Heidegger's fear is
that some day, calculative thinking would be accepted and practised as the only way of
thinking. Calculative thinking is the type of thought that deals only with the quantifiable and the measurable. Calculation refuses to let anything
appear except what is countable Calculative thinking compels it self into a compulsion to master every thing on the basis of the consequential
correctness of its procedure (Heidegger, 1998:235). Most disturbing is that technological

calculation and innovation

may satisfy our needs to such an extent that we would not even notice what we had lost.

The Affirmative is symptomatic of modernitys desire to bring the makeability of

things to the forefrontthe result is unlimited calculability
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]
Philosophy should, however, develop a critique of the present; after all, the need for a new grounding implies that contemporary humanity is inadequate
and groundless. The Echo, the most polemical part of the Contributions, thus describes modernity as the age of complete lack of questioning and

Modernity is dominated by machination (Machenschaft)an

interpretation of beings in which the makeability of beings comes to the forefront, in
such a way that beingness defines itself precisely in permanence and presence (126).
Machination is accompanied by a craving for lived experience (Erlebnis) subjective
stimulation, information, and entertainment (109, 129). The manipulation of the external
world thus corresponds to a manipulation of the internal world. In both cases, we
simply control and toy with our representations, instead of opening ourselves to an
event greater than we are that calls for genuine decision. A related phenomenon, the gigantic (7071),
characterizes the contemporary triumph of quantity as quality. To be now means to be measurable, and there are
no limits to measuring. Nothing is seen as impossible or unreachable any more, so the possibility of the in-exhaustible unexhausted
bewitchment (124), an age of nihilism (13841).

(137) is eliminated (Elden 2006, chapter 3).

Mass rallies and spectacles, such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics, would be convenient examples of machination, lived experience, and the gigantic.
However, Heidegger intends to describe a pervasive understanding of being that is not limited to massive objects and displays.

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private and inconspicuous experiences have been infected by modernitys reductive
and manipulative relation to beings. We all live in an age of decline.
Modernitys technological gaze un-grounds humans and allows for unprecedented
technological growth this results in totalizing calculative thought
Heidegger 55
[Professor and philosopher (Martin, 1955, Discourse on Thinking, part of the book Martin Heidegger: philosophical and political writings, p. 91-2, )]
This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world.
This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modem philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in

The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks
that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to
the world as such, in principle a technical one , developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long
it.

remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories.

The power concealed in modem technology determines the relation of man to that
which exists. It rules the whole earth. Indeed, already man is beginning to advance
beyond the earth into outer space . In not quite twenty years, such gigantic sources of power have become known through the
discovery of atomic energy that in the foreseeable future the world's demands for energy of any kind will be ensured forever. Soon the procurement of the
new energies will no longer be tied to certain countries and continents, as is the occurrence of coal, oil, and timber. In the foreseeable future it will be
possible to build atomic power stations anywhere on earth.

Thus the decisive question of science and technology today is no longer: Where do we
find sufficient quantities or fuel? The decisive question now runs: In what way can we
tame and direct the unimaginably vast amounts of atomic energies, and so secure
mankind against the danger that these gigantic energies suddenlyeven without
military actionsbreak out somewhere, run away" and destroy everything?
If the taming of atomic energy is successful, and it will be successful, then a totally new era of technical development will begin. What we know now as
the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air transportation, of news reporting, and as medical and nutritional technology, is
presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advances will move faster and faster and can never be

man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of

technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag
along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or
otherthese forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his
will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.
stopped. In all areas of his existence,

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Being
Technological thinking reduces everything to being erasing ordering
Belu & Feenberg 2010
(Dana S., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ California State University Dominiguez Hills & Andrew, Research Chair in Philosophy of
Technology @ Simon Fraser University, Heideggers Aporetic Ontology of Technology, p.3, February 2010) JM
In Das Ge-Stell Heidegger tends toward a totalized account of enframing. Ordering

is a fundamental feature of the

technical lifeworld. Its essence is something more than merely a machination (Machenschaft) of people,
consummated in the way of exploitation, (GA 79, p. 29) because in the technical age people
are themselves constrained to order. This constraint is, presumably, most evident in our handling of machine technology but
is not restricted to this realm. This power of ordering allows the supposition that, what is here called ordering is not merely a human doing, even
though the human being belongs to its execution [. . .] Insofar as human representation readily sets up what presences as the orderable in the
calculation of ordering,

the human being remains in its essence, whether consciously or not, set
up as something to be ordered by ordering [. . .] The human being is orderings man [. . .] The essence of
man is consequently set-up, bringing ordering into human ways Thus we in the
technological age are determined or set-up by being as enframing . The truth or unhiddenness
(aletheia) of technical beings and things remains concealed. Ordering strikes nature and history, everything that is, and in all ways, how what
presences is. What presences is set-up as orderability and is in advance represented as permanence whose stand is determined from out of ordering.

What is permanent and constantly present is standing-reserve . Heideggers description of this system in
these essays is remarkable. Enframing snatches everything that presences into orderability and is in
this way a gathering of this snatching. Enframing is: Ensnatching (Geraff). The possibilities of relating to any and all types of machine technology are
summed up by enframing. Enframing describes the on-going commotion (Betrieb) of rotation and turning or spinning (Drehung) of gears (Getriebe),
that orders (bestellt) hydroelectric power plants, automobiles and business (Betrieb) round and round (Kreisgang) in a chain of ordering (Kette des
Bestellens), without substantive goals and meaning. Thus, a

leveled down, impersonal and mechanical form of

exchange defines all human activity. Furthermore, the rotating mechanism that sets wheels and gears in motion is the same

as the circulation of industry, information and the flow of markets. Heidegger writes, Machine technology does not exist separately . . . Machine
technology does not merely replace equipment and mechanisms. It is just as little an object. It stands only insofar as it moves. It moves insofar as it
runs. It runs in the hustle and bustle of business. The hustle and bustle drives as the intrigue of the ordering of the orderable. When the machine idles,
then its rest constitutes a circumstance of business, its stopping or disturbance. Machines belong inside a machinery. But this machinery is not a heap
of machines. This machinery runs out of the ensnatching of business as that which is ordered as resource by enframing

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Development
Their notion of development is part and parcel with the imperialist tradition of
technocratic management of unimproved or uninhabited spaces.
Spanos 2000
(William V., Prof of English @ Binghamton, Americas Shadow, p. 41-44,) WE DO NOT ENDORSE ANY POTENTIAL GENDERED LANGUAGE
What, however, the panoptic Eurocentric eye of the Enlightenment comes to see in the space within this reconfigured trope of the circle is no longer - or
at least not exclusively - a vast "uninhabited" emptiness, in which the natives do not count as human beings. Rather, it comes primarily to see an
uninformed terra incognita. As the texts of early European travel writers (and social historians) invariably characterize this amorphous and ahistorical
"new world," the European

panoptic gaze falls on an "unimproved" space. As the privative prefix mphatically

suggests, it is a space-time in which everything in it flora, fauna, minerals, animals, and, later, human beings - is
seen and encoded not so much as threatening, though that meaning is clearly there as well, as wasteful or
uneconomical and thus as an untended fallow (female) terrain calling futurally for the
beneficial ministrations of the (adult, male) center.72 The predestinarian metaphorics of the
circle precipitates a whole rhetoric of moral necessity. The "wilderness" as
"underdeveloped" or "unimproved" or "uncultivated" (i.e., "unfulfilled" or "uncircular") space must,
as the privative prefixes demand, be developed, improved, cultivated (i.e., fulfilled or circularized).
Indeed, it is the wilderness's destiny. From this representation of the colonial Others as mired in and by
their own chaotic primordial condition, one of the most debilitating of which is
unproductive perpetual war, it is an easy.. step to representing them, as American writers and historians
did the Indian race in the nineteenth century, as either self-doomed73 or appealing to the European to save them
from themselves by way of imposing his peace on their multiply wasteful strife . Referring to
e

74

John Barrow's representative (enlightened) "anticonquest" narrative about his travels as an agent of the British colonial governor in the interior of the
Cape Colony at the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Louise Pratt writes: The visual descriptions presuppose - naturalize - a transformative project
embodied in the Europeans. Often the project surfaces explicitly in Barrow's text, in visions of "improvement" whose value is often expressed as
aesthetic.. It

is the task of the advanced scouts for capitalist "improvement" to encode what they
encounter as "unimproved" and, in keeping with the terms of the anti-conquest , as
disponible, available for improvement. European aspirations must be represented as uncontested. Here the textual apartheid that
separates landscapes from people, accounts of inhabitants from accounts of their habitats, fulfills its logic. The European improving eye produces
subsistence habitats as "empty" landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future and of their potential for producing a marketable surplus.
From the point of view of their inhabitants, of course, these same spaces are lived as intensely humanized, saturated with local history and meaning,
where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories, places in indigenous knowledge formations.75
This is an acute observation about the "anti-conquest" imperialist discourse of Enlightenment travel writing. But it is limited by its characteristic
restriction of the word "improvement" to the historical context of modern capitalism (though the aside referring to the expression of the vision of

Like so much "postcolonial" criticism, its historicist

problematic is blind to the genealogy of this modern "anti-conquest" concept. It fails to
see that the rhetoric of "improvement" is a capitalist extension of a much older system of
imperial tropes, one that, in naturalizing the latter, obscures the will to power over the
Other that is visible in its earlier form. This word, that is, not only looks forward to
"underdeveloped," the sedimented counterword that constitutes the base of the
neocolonialist discourse of late capitalism, as Pratt seems to be suggesting. It also harks back to what Enrique Dussel calls the
improvement in aesthetic terms is suggestive).

"developmental fallacy" informing Enlightenment philosophy of history from Adam Smith and John Locke through Hegel "and a certain Marx to
Habermas.

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Holocaust
Technological understanding of being creates the mindset that people and the
environment are a standing reserve for consumption. What doesnt hold value to us is
waste to be discarded. It was this type of technological thinking that allowed the
extermination of the Jews
Zimmerman 94
[ Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University p.43 (Michael, Contesting Earth's Future, Initials),]
,

Mass
extermination in the Nazi camps was possible only because of developments within industrial technology.
Moreover, the Nazis spoke of the Jews as if they were little more than industrial waste to be
disposed of as efficiently as possible. Officials in charge of planning strategic use of nuclear weapons must be trained to
Nevertheless, in speaking of the Holocaust in the same breath with the hydrogen bomb, Heidegger was making an important point.

conceive of the enemy populace in wholly abstract terms. Heidegger argued in several places that the hydrogen bomb- an instrument of mass
extermination- was not the real problem facing us. Instead, the problem is the pervasion and construction of humanitys understanding of being itself in

Extermination camps and hydrogen bombs, from Heideggers viewpoint, were both
symptoms of humanitys conception of itself and everything else as a resource to be
produced and consumed, created and destroyed, at will.
the technological era.

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Predictions Turn Solvency

Technological thinking is always in the service of maintaining the status quo.
Swazo 02
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska (Norman K., Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections, p. 43]
Whether the subject was understood as world order studies, global policy analysis, or

futurology, a sense of the problem and

the need for drastic global reform came of age . The report of the first phase of the Club of Rome's Project in the

Predicament of Mankind perhaps served most to generate awareness of the imminent crisis. Concerned with "five basic factors that determine and
therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet-population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution," this
research group constructed a world model "built specifically to investigate five major trends ```of global concern accelerating industrialization, rapid

The main
conclusion of the report is that "If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization,
pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be
reached some time within the next one hundred years ."' Scenarios of the future, as I have
noted, depend on methodological orientations, on whether the analysis is concerned with
empirical norms primarily or some balance of empirical norms with moral norms.
Futures research concerned more with empirical norms tends to concentrate on
quantitative methods and computer analysis, producing "hard" models or scenarios of
alternative futures. Robert Clute describes such efforts thus: International futures research attempts to examine current interrelated global
population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment."'

issues in order to project or forecast the future consequences of past and present trends and to suggest alternative scenarios in an attempt to avoid
undesired consequences. This work has become known as futurology, which, according to Victor Ferkiss, "combines the knowledge of the scientist, the
will of the utopian and the imagination of the writer of science fiction." The policy aspect of international futures is in essence an attempt at long-term

The problem with futures research, however, notes Clute, is that the most visible
works which "purport to be global in approach are, in the main, biased toward
scenarios that are concerned with maintaining the systems and values If the market economy,
planning.'

developed states. ... Indeed, many of the major futures studies are extremely ethnocentric and are therefore resisted by much of the world."'

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Politics Cant Solve Terrorism

Political approaches to combating terrorism miss its metaphysical dimension- failure
to inquire into the ontology of terrorism makes attempts to manage it useless
Mitchell 02
(Prof (J, Initials) Andrew , . Stanford Univ. , Research in Phenomenology 35, k5 p. 181-2)
Heideggerian thought is a thinking that is engaged with its times. Whatever we might make of Heideggers political choices, the fact remains that even
these decisions can be seen as attempts to think with and against the times. It is no stretch to say that

our time

today

is the time of

terrorisman uncommon time, no matter how common a claim this may beespecially in the United States. What then might a Heideggerian
engagement with our time of terrorism bring to light? To answer this, it is important to note that Heideggerian thinking, as a thinking of being, must
engage with its times precisely because it is through these times that we first find our access to being (or rather beyng, Seyn). For Heidegger, however,

is dominated by technology and, as his later writings endeavor to show, this is indicative of a
withdrawal of being. Heidegger distinguishes himself from the various foes of technology, however, by viewing this withdrawal as
the contemporary scene

nothing negative on its own. Instead, this withdrawal is a further dispensation of being. Beyng withdraws and grants us these withdrawn times. This does

The withdrawal of being is found in

these abandoned beings themselves and is determinative for the way they exist. Heideggerian
thinking, then, allows us to ask the question of our times and to think terrorism. My contention in the following is that the
withdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism, where beings exist as terrorized.
Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum total of activities carried out by terrorist groups, but a challenge directed at
beings as a whole. Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue, and it names the way in which beings show themselves
not mean that beyng exists unperturbed somewhere behind or beyond these beings.

today, i.e., as terrorized. This ontological point demands that there be the ontic threat of real terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorism

destined to fail. Political reactions to terrorism,

which depict terrorism from the outset as a political problem, miss the fact that terrorism itself, a
metaphysical issue, is coincident with a transformation in politics. That is to say, political
responses to terrorism fail to think terrorism. In what follows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking
also indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is

terrorism as a question of being and sketch a few characteristics of the politico-technological landscape against which terrorism takes place.

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Value to Life (1)

The rise of the technology of modernity results in an alienating relationship to the
world this destroys lifes meaning
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992, )]
Kierkegaard thought that the

answer to nihilism was to make one's own individual absolute

commitment. If you can commit yourself unconditionally -- in love for instance -- then that
becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede into insignificance on the basis of that
ultimate concern. One does not discover a significance that is already there. There is no basis for this
commitment in the cosmos. Indeed, such a commitment is exactly the opposite of belief in an objective
truth. You are called by some concrete concern -- either a person or a cause -- and when you define yourself by your dedication to that concern, your
world acquires seriousness, and significance.

The only way to have a meaningful life in the present age , then, is to let your involvement
become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is not
something that is in any way provisional -- although it certainly is vulnerable . That is why,
once a society like ours becomes rational and reflective, such total commitments begin
to look like a kind of dangerous dependency. The committed individual is identified as a workaholic or a woman who
loves too much. This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing.
But as

our culture comes more and more to celebrate critical detachment, selfsufficiency, and rational choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments . So,
commitment itself beings to look like craziness.

a lack of
anything in the modern world that could solicit commitment from us and sustain us in
it. The things that once evoked commitment --gods, heroes, the God-man, the acts of great statesmen, the words of great
thinkers -- have lost their authority. As a result, individuals feel isolated and alienated. They
feel that their lives have no meaning because the public world contains no guidelines.
Thus Heidegger comes to see the recent undermining of commitment as due not so much to a failure on the part of the individual, as to

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Value to Life (2)

Technological thinking necessitates calculative politics. This leads to the zero-point of
holocaust a point where our very existence is meaningless.
Dillon 99
(Professor of International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Political Theory, Vol 27, No, 5, Another Justices, Michael, . 2, 164-)
The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism'. They trade
in it still to devastating global effect. The

technologisation of the political has become manifest and

global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without
mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, unit[s], of amount
are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation .
Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without deaf either. There is nothing
abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of
holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of valuerightsmay claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the
invaluable. Counted. the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life.

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Genocide
Technological thought causes genocides
Athaniasou 03
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/differences/v014/14.1athanasiou.html),
(Athena-, Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 125-162 )

modern technology, he argues, shows itself in what we call Enframing, Ge-stell: the setting up and
hunting down of nature as standing-reserve, the ordering and challenging of nature to
unconceal itself (Question 23). Samuel Weber translates [End Page 134] Ge-stell as emplacement, in order to retain the reference to
The essence of

place and to placing which is paramount in Heideggers discussion of the phenomenon. Weber also suggests, taking his cue from Heideggers own
semantic suggestions, that the translation by skeleton would not be inappropriate. He explains: For

the more technology seeks

to put things in their proper place, the less proper those places turn out to be, the more
displaceable everything becomes and the more frenetic becomes the effort to reassert
the propriety of the place as such (124). 8 I would add that the translation by the word skeleton would not be inappropriate
for another reason as well: it echoes the corporeal implications of Enframing; more specifically, it signals a claim upon a crumbling and perished
corporeality, evidenced byor, rather, revealed asthe very remains of those reduced to a standing-reserve, deemed unfit to live. Despite Heideggers
somewhat neutral employment of Enframing, his notion is itself charged with strong implications of the biopolitical propriety underwriting the skeletal
power to body forth beings and things, to challenge them forth within the configuration, the Frame-work, of modern technology. 9 In Heideggers
questioning (understood as a will to essence), edibility and extermination are interlaced, and as such, are inscribedor emplacedwithin the regime of
industrial planning and technology. The

mass annihilation of human bodies and the mass production

of the means of human subsistence together usher in the era of technological
Enframing, articulatedthrough Heideggers framing device of analogyas instances of the modern technologies
of amassing, clearing, crashing, and becoming-waste. 10 Man, plant, and, most crucially, the animalthe other
of man in Western metaphysicsemerge as essential categories whose ontological distinctions are blurred and collapsed at the horizon of modern
technology. With the obsolescence of the (nostalgic) aletheic essence of handling 11 in favor of mechanical means, bodies

(human and
non-human) are figured as final products, mere effects, of a technological inevitability ,
vestigial (or skeletal) residues of physis in the topos, or better, in the thesis, of the factory and the camp, the wastelands of modernity. The emphasis on
this essential operational affinity occludesor brings to light precisely by writing out of the self-aware tropological spacethe singularities and
temporalities of the human/non-human spectrum: those whose labor and time are consumed and exploited in the automated assembly-line of human
food agriculture;

those who feed their human living mortality by consuming the industrially produced

agricultural commodities; those who, by virtue of their assigned biogenetic and [End Page 135] morphological status as non-human animals are

susceptible to being confined to motorized frameworks of human handling; and those,

naked and anonymous, who were not only forced into slave labor but reduced to life that does
not deserve to live by the biopolitical technology of the Nazi extermination camp. These disparate singularities remain unacknowledged
bound to dissolve in the crucible of Enframingnot only precluding certain kinds of questions and foreclosing the possibility of a different kind of
questioning but also absolving the philosopher from the task of responding differently to the paradigm of extermination. In the Heideggerian text, the
agricultural factory and the concentration camp thus become the exemplary delimited spaces of modern Enframing, where the spectrum of
technomediated mere life is delineated in all its limits, continuities, and discontinuities. In the exchange of typical instances, examples, paradeigma-ta, the regime of Enframing, where man is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, is fused with technological execution whereby the
naked body is left bare of any subjective content, standing before the sovereign power that constitutes and obliterates it as such. Heideggers reference to
the concentration camp gives an example as much as it sets an example: it brings to light the naked body of the technologies of modernity as
indistinguishable from its intimate limit, and the word s oma thus resumes its Homeric Greek limit-designation of a fallen or thrown nonliving body, a
corpse. But it does so, however, in a way that obliterates the eponymous subjectivity of those nonliving bodies, reducing them to a faceless and
nameless mass of by-products. It does so in a way that undermines any involvement with response-ability for the Nazi realm of Enframing, a regime of
decimating Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and communists, all precluded from the realm of humanness and, as such, put to death. The subjugation of
human life and death to biopolitical sovereignty comes to be what is at stake in modern technology; it also returns to haunt Heideggers questioning of
technology. In a certain sense, the force of substitution encapsulated in Heideggers use of the correspondence between industrial agricultural production
and the industrial production of corpses here resonates uncannily with the scene of sacrificial offering (in its particular instantiation in the scene of the
holocaust, which signifies burnt offering). And thus, absolved from the form of political execution sanctioned as the racial purgation of the human,
the systematic obliteration of the crematoria becomes redolent with the innocuous expiation of the sacrificial pyre. In the illuminating ritual flames of
[End Page 136] symbolic exchange and fusion, the forces of displacement and replacement take the upper hand; boundaries bleed and limits are tested
between the living and the dead, subject and object, the natural and the social, the sacred and the profane, inclusion and exclusion, humanity and
divinity, human form and animal form, animate and inanimate matter, the saved and the lost, the edible and the discarded, killing and purifying, and
killing and eating.

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Ethics
Technology is ambiguous, failure to recognize this results in an ethical crisis that strips
us of what the essence of human being is
Hodge 95
[Joanna, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, Introduction, Heidegger and Ethics pg.49, 1995, SM, Accessed: 7/1/11]

The essence of technology is thus ambiguous, in ways which connect to an ambiguity diagnosed by Heidegger as central to
philosophical enquiry. The claim about the ambiguity of technology runs: 'The essence of
technology is in an elevated sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of
alI revelation: i.e. of truth' (QT: 33). In 'The question of technology', Heidegger discusses the oddness of there
being so little reflection on the impact of the spread of technical relations in our world. This
failure to reflect marks an ethical crisis, which Heidegger, as a result of his preoccupation with reading and transmitting
the philosophical tradition, cannot identify as such. What Heidegger calls the end of philosophy in the completion of
metaphysics is here interpreted as the emergence of an ethical challenge to the
domination of philosophy by metaphysical concerns, which presume that specifying the nature of entities is the
primary aim of philosophical enquiry. This challenge prompts a recognition of the priority of a question about the location from which that specification
takes place. Instead of Heidegger's emphasis on a cumulative but illogical development, in which even the traces of a history of being disappear, the
lectures in The

Principle of Reason can be read as locating a tension between that emphasis

and an attempt to identify the consequences for the essence of what it is to be human
resulting from this disappearance and the consequent uninhibited spread of technical
relations in our world. One such consequence is that it becomes unclear what the
essence of human beings is.

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Commodification
Technological Thinking Orders All Beings, Resulting in the Commodification and
Productisation of all Aspects of Life, From Nature to Culture to Weaponry.
Joronen 08
(Mikko, Department of Geography, University of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space: On Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization.,
https://www.doria.fi/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257.pdf?sequence=)
Accordingly, Heidegger understands modern technology above all as a metaphysical project. Modern technological devices, from
the manual technology and manufacture of the industrial age to the revolutions made first by the engine technology and then by what Heidegger
(1998h:132133) calls the ruling determination of modern technology as cybernetics (i.e. the rise and irruption of the systems of maximum possible
automation of command), all

manifest a peculiar mode of revealing that is not just total in nature, but an ever-growing
imperial drive structured to constantly reach towards global enlargement and
intensification. Eventually such technological unfolding leads to a diversity of phenomena,
including the worldwide homogenization of modes of living, the constant mobilization
of cultural and economic practices, the global circulation of information , goods, capital, people,
and knowledge, the establishment of colossal stocks of energy with massive potentiality of
destruction as well (with the weapons of mass destruction), and the commodification and productisation
of all aspects of life from nature to culture, from genetic information to consumption culture even a certain
insensibility with regard to tragedies of suffering (for instance through the television spectacles of war and
catastrophe), as Haar adds (1993:80; see also Gillespie 1984:128; Mugerauer 2008:xv-xviii). In spite of the seemingly diverging characters, the former
phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena of the age defining metaphysical scaffolding of technological revealing; it is the framework of calculative
drive, the technological revealing of enframing, which allows for multiple set of phenomena to emerge. As will be later shown in more detail, such sense
of unity is first and foremost typical for a metaphysical mechanism of unfolding operative throughout the 2300 year tradition of Western thinking, a
mechanism still being constitutive for the contemporary technological enframing (Gestell) and self-heightening machination (Machenschaft) of all
things. As a matter of fact, it is the planetary outcome of such a technological mode of unfolding, which according to
Peter Sloterdijk (2009) was first initiated and started as a mathematical globalization as a project that in Heideggerean reading was boosted into its
technological form by early modern philosophers and mathematical physicists further proceeding as a terrestrial globalization, finally leading to an
age of planetary globe, which eventually turned the earth into a mere planet under totally penetrable networks of orderings (Thrift 2008:234235;
Morin 2009; See also Heidegger 1998h:133; Dallmayr 2005:44; Radloff 2007b:3648). As the thesis will show, the contemporary planetary unfolding
was first initiated by the latent ground of thought behind the metaphysical formulations of early Greek philosophers, further boosted by the

In such a
planet, conceived as a mass of matter wandering in empty universe, everything is called
to be useable, penetrable, mouldable, decodable and mobile.
mathematical developments of early modern thinkers, finally coming forth as cybernetic systems of ordering cast upon the planet.

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Ontological Damnation
The enframing of the aff surrenders our ideals, dreams, and Being for promises of
contentment in a material paradisecreating a hell on eartha fate worse than
nuclear annihilation.
Zimmerman 94
(Michael, Prof of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earth's Future, p.119-120)
Heidegger asserted that human

self assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the

relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more
dangerous than a nuclear war that might bring about the complete annihilation of
humanity and the destruction of the earth. This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is
better to forfeit the world than to lose ones soul by losing ones relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that

after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will
ever again occur in an ontological clearing through which life could manifest itself.
Further, since modernitys one dimensional disclosure to entities virtually denies that
any being at all, the loss of humanitys openness for being is already occurring.
Modernitys background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material happiness for everyone by
reducing nature into pure energy. The

unleashing of vast quantities of energy in a nuclear war would

be equivalent to modernitys slow destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would
equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided a nuclear war only to survive as
contended clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological
damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise.

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Exploitation/Domination
Technological thought objectifies realitythis ensures exploitation and domination
Botha 02
(Catherine, Dept. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Pretoria, Heidegger, Technology and Ecology, South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol 22, Issue 2, p.
ebscohost)

Technology is the main historical manifestation of the subjectivism introduced by

Western metaphysical thought (Mehta, 1971:56). Metaphysical subjectivism views the human
being as a subject standing before an object of perception. This view of the world as an
object results in its instrumental use and domination . The subjectivism underlying modern technology has
evolved into a radical humanism (Heidegger, 1993:225), i.e., it has become an objectifying anthropocentrism.
In his discussion of the emerging world picture in The Age of the World Picture (1977), Heidegger further illuminates the nature of this
anthropocentrism. The

world conceived as a picture is a metaphysical reduction of the world to

a human representation. This representation of the world as an object becomes the
basic human experience and the world picture becomes humanity's main measure of
reality.5 By world picture, Heidegger means that we have effectively reduced the world to our representation of it. The human subject, in effect,
begins to create her own reality. Wherever she looks, human being every where and always encounters only (Heidegger, 1993:332) herself. All that
exists does so because it is represented or produced by us.

Modern technological thought challenges nature as standing reservethis justifies

violence and exploitation
Beckman 00
(Tad, Prof of Philosophy @ Harvey Mudd College, "Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,"
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html)
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different
human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with
techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, " the

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

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War/Environmental Destruction
Technological thought that reduces the world as manageable makes war and
destruction of the environment inevitable
Kateb 97
[(George, Professor of Politics @ Princeton, "Technology and Philosophy," Social Research, Fall, Vol 64, No 3, p. ebscohost)]
Heidegger means to show that Western metaphysics -- and metaphysics includes theology -- is a continuously if sometimes covertly reiterated Platonism.
By his method of exegesis, Heidegger tries to persuade us that Platonic metaphysics converts the world into a picture for the mind's eye, and by doing
that, prepares Western humanity to lose sight of the mere fact of existence, the unsummoned thereness of reality, of the given. Metaphysics inveterately

The purpose of the reduction is to make the world intelligible and hence
manageable, fit to be worked on, and made ready to have practical order imposed on it .
reduces the world.

The world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just because it is given; the dislike engenders anger, and from anger comes rebellion. Western
humanity is and has always been at war with given reality, to a much greater degree than the rest of humanity, and in a remarkably distinct manner.

Technology is the most spectacular campaign in the great war waged by Western
humanity against nature or reality as given. To repeat: the deepest cause of that war is not
scarcity, not the failure of nature to make better provision for a necessitous humanity,
but, instead, a Western willfulness, a will to power, to mastery, an overflow of energy
that wants to shake the world to pieces and make it over. The craving is either to put the human stamp on

reality or at least to rescue nature from the absence of any honestly detectable stamp, any detectable natural purpose or intention. As Nietzsche says:
humanity, in its asceticism, "wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most profound, powerful, and basic
conditions" (Nietzsche, 1969, sec. 11, pp. 117-18). Western humanity cannot let things be on their own terms or coax gently from them their own best
potentiality; it is so far unable to practice what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit. Western metaphysics is the sponsor of anger and hence of repeated violence
towards nature.

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***CALCULATIVE THOUGHT IMPACTS***

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Turns Case
All attempts to think global politics presuppose an ontology which inform all following
action world order studies inherently follow a calculative and technology mindset! All
the aff claims are premised on an ontology of calculation which must be confronted
before we can enact change
Swazo 02
[professor of philosophy at university of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2002 [Norman K, Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections p.74-76]

To the extent that world order studies are steeped in a strategic rationality, in calculative
thinking, they do not concern themselves with the task of having a reflective insight
into the fundamental features of the age. They do not concern themselves with the
ground that enables any thinking and doing such as is pursued by a science, natural or
social. Yet, it is this enabling ground that is really determinative of that science, inasmuch
as all positing of a domain of inquiry presupposes an ontology. World order studies , as a
development of contemporary social science, likewise are dependent upon one or another ontological
commitment. Specifically, I shall argue, they are determined by the ontological positions that prevail in the
modern period of Western philosophy; for these are the positions fundamentally decisive for
the profound change taking place in humanity's self-understanding, in our conception
of all that is content of our world, and our relation to this world . About this I shall concern myself in
section 2. Before doing this it is important that this relation between a positive science and ontology be stated in broad outline. For this I turn to
Heidegger. "All non-philosophical sciences," remarks Heidegger, "have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in
every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences."8 Continuing, Heidegger writes: They are posited by them in advance; they are a positum for
them. All the propositions of the non-philosophical sciences, including those of mathematics, are positive propositions. Hence, to distinguish them from
philosophy, we shall call all non-philosophical sciences positive sciences. Positive sciences deal with that which is, with beings; that is to say, they always
deal with specific domains, for instance, nature. Within a given domain scientific research again cuts out particular spheres: nature as physically
material lifeless nature and nature as living nature. It divides the sphere of the living into individual fields: the plant world, the animal world. Another
domain of beings is history; its spheres are art history, political history, history of science, and history of religion. . . . The beings of these domains are
familiar to us even if at first and for the most part we are not in a position to delimit them sharply and clearly from one another. We can, of course,
always name, as a provisional description which satisfies practically rhe purpose of posi- tive science, some being that falls within the domain We can
always bring forward and picture ourselves some being belonging to any given domain. ... A beingthat's something, a table, a chair, a tree, the sky, a

World order studies are, properly speaking, nonphilosophical. While concerned with a
political domain that is central to these
inquiries, presupposing the classical architectonic claims of the science of politics for
thinking and doing.10 Insofar as the political domain is primary, world order studies deal with beings that
are said to be political, however explicitly or ambiguously this denomination is to be understood. Such beings are things of vatious kinds:
body, some words, an action.9

number of domainspolitical, economic, historical, etc.it is the

humans qua citizens, office holders, rulers, legislatots; words such as public or official documents, codes of law, tteaties of reciprocal obligation, spoken
discoutse; actions in all modes of public being-with-one-another; things mote or less familiar but not so well delimitedregimes, states, constitutions,
organizations, associations; in short, things that have theit being in thought, wotd, and deed. All

beings of the political domain

become the proper concern of this thinking qua world order studies , despite the division of this
domain into particular spheres (domestic politics and international relations) and individual fields (foreign policy, legislation, public law, public

For world order studies, politics

presents itself as global. Politics so conceived, as well as patterns of behaviot and practice between levels of
government, matter insofar as they bear upon and contribute to the overall condition of our common
planetaty existence. Indeed, properly speaking, where global identity and global interdependence are
determinative of outlook concerning political existence, the distinction of domestic and
international spheres becomes rather anachronistic, remaining useful only for
purposes of analyses and investigations proper to the science of politics in its present
empirically-oriented methodology. It is important to undetstand that political science posits in advance the
various political things that constitute its objects of investigation. In this posit, an ontology what these
things are, how they are, their way of being is implicit, if not explicit. This ontology, insofar as it is the ontology of the
specific domain or region of beings that politics is, grounds the science of politics . That is, political science can
be said to be dependent on, or to derive from, a regional ontology, viz., political ontology. Ontology as
administration, state and municipal or provincial and local government, party politics, etc.).

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such is a theoretical inquiry, i.e., inquiry "explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities," this meaning being articulated by
way of basic concepts. Political ontology, too, is a theoretical inquiry devoted to the meaning
of those entities that provide the subject matter of empirical political science qua
positive science. Consider Heidegger's following comments concerning such a relation: Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and
naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been
worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of
Being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The 'basic concepts' which thus arise remain our proximal clues
for disclosing this area concretely for the first time. ... Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an
understanding beforehand of the subject-matter underlying all the objects a science
takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding. Only
after the area itself has been explored beforehand in a corresponding manner do these concepts become genuinely demonstrated
and 'grounded'. But since every such area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary research,
from which the basic concepts are drawn, signifies nothing else than an interpretation of those entities
with regard to their basic state of being. n It is in taking the "step back," so to speak, from the positing of a domain and the
research undertaken by a positive science to the ontology implicit in this "demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter" that one begins to
make the move from calculative thinking to meditative thinking. Inasmuch as meditative thinking is concerned with the "meaning" that reigns in things
and thus with the ground that enables scientific inquiry, the orientation of such thinking is primarily ontological rather than positive (scientific). Here we
have the distinction between philosophy and science specifically, between philosophy qua metaphysics and science. We can now begin to make our way
through the questions initially set forth at the beginning of this chapter, and to clarifying the need for and justification of meditative thinking as it bears
upon contemporary world order thinking.

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The Ontological Nuclear Bomb

We are doomed to complete ontological damnation if we allow calculative mastery over
the world to continue. This results in ecological destruction, nuclear war, a complete
loss of meaning, the end of thinking, the end of politics and the end of everything.
Thiele 95
[Leslie, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics, pg 203-204]

The age of planetary mastery, technological dominance, and the end of metaphysics , Heidegger
speculates, will likely endure for a long time (EP 95). Indeed, there is no certainty that, from humanity's point of view, a
succession to some other mode of revealing truth is ordained. The technological quest may reach its climax, as it were, without us. In the
absence of an ontological reorientation, humanity would then be "left to the giddy whirl
of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty
nothingness" (EP 87). Estimating the likelihood of this apocalyptic conclusion is not Heidegger's concern. In any case, it is fair to say
that the physical annihilation of humanity is not Heidegger's most proximate worry.
Foremost in his mind is the ontological meaning of this potential self-annihilation . If, as
Heidegger put it, "the will to action, which here means the will to make and be effective,
has overrun and crushed thought," then our chances of escaping the catastrophic
whirlwind of enframing are slim indeed (WCT25). The danger is that intensive technological
production may simply overpower human being's capacity for manifold modes of
disclosure, displacing the freedom inherent in philosophic thought, artistic creativity, and
political action. Undeniably technology fosters thinking, creating, and acting of sorts. Calculation, cognition, innovation, and engineering are
highly valued within technological society, though even here it is not clear that computers and robots might not eventually displace more of these
capacities than their production demands. The real menace, however, is that social

engineering would obviate political

action, endlessly innovative production would leave artistic creativity to atrophy, and
utilitarian cognition would fully displace philosophic questioning." Because the human capacity for thought is the
foundation for artistic creativity and political action, Heidegger indicates that its loss is his most pressing concern. He writes, " In this
dawning atomic age a far greater danger threatensprecisely when the danger of a
third world war has been removed. ... the approaching tide of technological revolution in
the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking
may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking" (DT 56). In the
wake of this revolution we find ourselves desperately in need of "an education in thinking" (TB 72). Such an education would, at a minimum, allow us to
discern why calculative thought could never adequately substitute for philosophic thought. In the absence of such learning, and in the continued thrall of
enframing, our capacity for philosophic thought may wither beyond resuscitation. Most

disturbing and dangerous, however,

this situation need not disturb or appear dangerous at all. Technological calculation
and innovation may satisfy both our intensified material needs and our diminished
spiritual demands. As Heidegger warns: "The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand
with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the
organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men" (WCT 30). Devastation
need not mean discontent. Indeed, technological devastation may consist in humanity's
creation of a brave and exciting new world. Utopia and oblivion , as Buckminster Fuller prophesied,
may well coincide. Devastation, Heidegger states, "is the high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne" (WCT 30). Mnemosyne, or
remembrance, designates not simply a recollection of what was, but also a "steadfast intimate
concentration" on and a "devotion" toward worldly things and affairs. Remembrance is the "constant concentrated
abiding with something not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may come. What is pas t,
present, and to come appears in the oneness of its own present being" (WCT 140). The ex-pulsion of memory, therefore, is the
loss of the capacity to abide by, rather than challenge forth, the world. Once the fourfold is
reduced to an extension of our cerebral computations and technical orderings our
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capacity to dwell within its horizons vanishes. We sit complacent in homelessness. The
devastation is complete

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Racism/Sexism
The Logic of Calculative Thought Generates Racism and Sexism.
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University Press, pg. 7)

Those of us who are white know this strategy very well. confronted with our racism, we
respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but rather
by feeling guilty. Our energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep
our distance from them. Through guilt we paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy
for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes watched this strategy employed by the
caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed our criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men - the 'good' men,

But seldom have we seen honest attempts at

change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the status quo ;
and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage, and we have heard men ask, "Why are you punishing us?" The primary
issue then becomes the need to attend to the feelings of those criticized rather than to
their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a
facet of power; it is not a reordering of power or a signal of oppression's end. Guilt is
one of the modern managerial self's maneuvers of self-defense. Of course guilt does not feel that way. It
feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense. But we are shaped,
informed. produced in our very selves by the same forces of history that have created
calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably, whenever we are confronted with the
unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to
protect themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the midst of very real pain, is
not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen - in fact it strengthens - its power as a
strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological thinking struggles to defend and
maintain itself through us and as us.
by far the most responsive men - deflate. apologize, and ask us to forgive.

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Value to Life (1)

Calculative thought makes all life expendable and open to extermination
Dillon 99
(Professor of International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Political Theory, Vol 27, No, 5, Another Justices, Michael, . 2, 164-)
The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism'. They trade
in it still to devastating global effect. The

technologisation of the political has become manifest and

global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without
mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, unit[s], of amount
are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation .
Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without deaf either. There is nothing
abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of
holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of valuerightsmay claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the
invaluable. Counted. the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life.

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Value to Life (2)

The rise of the technology of modernity results in an alienating relationship to the
world this destroys lifes meaning
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992, )]
Kierkegaard thought that the

answer to nihilism was to make one's own individual absolute

commitment. If you can commit yourself unconditionally -- in love for instance -- then that
becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede into insignificance on the basis of that
ultimate concern. One does not discover a significance that is already there. There is no basis for this
commitment in the cosmos. Indeed, such a commitment is exactly the opposite of belief in an objective
truth. You are called by some concrete concern -- either a person or a cause -- and when you define yourself by your dedication to that concern, your
world acquires seriousness, and significance.

The only way to have a meaningful life in the present age , then, is to let your involvement
become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is not
something that is in any way provisional -- although it certainly is vulnerable . That is why,
once a society like ours becomes rational and reflective, such total commitments begin
to look like a kind of dangerous dependency. The committed individual is identified as a workaholic or a woman who
loves too much. This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing.
But as

our culture comes more and more to celebrate critical detachment, selfsufficiency, and rational choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments . So,
commitment itself beings to look like craziness.

a lack of
anything in the modern world that could solicit commitment from us and sustain us in
it. The things that once evoked commitment --gods, heroes, the God-man, the acts of great statesmen, the words of great
thinkers -- have lost their authority. As a result, individuals feel isolated and alienated. They
feel that their lives have no meaning because the public world contains no guidelines.
Thus Heidegger comes to see the recent undermining of commitment as due not so much to a failure on the part of the individual, as to

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Nuclear Annihilation
The affirmatives engagement in calculative thought reaffirms the destructive
potentialities of atomic weaponry
Housman and Flynn 11
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]
In his lecture The Thing, Heidegger considers the concept of nearness and shows that the shortening of distances pervading society does not make us
any nearer to considering the thing as thing. Heidegger says, Up to now, the human has considered the thing as a thing just as little as he has considered
nearness (1951, 1-5).14 We

have failed to consider the thinghood of the thingwe merely

produce, use, and consume things without them being near to us, without thinking about the ways in
which the thing represents itself and presences. This is no new occurrence, though. Heidegger says, [T]he compelling
knowledge of science has already annihilated the thing as thing, long before the atomic
bomb exploded. The explosion of the atomic bomb is only the crudest of all crude
confirmations of an annihilation of things that occurred long ago (1949, 1-8). These new
technological devices, like the atomic bomb or television, do not define technology and do not
explain why we have lost our sense of nearness to things; rather, a larger metaphysical,
calculative, scientific, and thoughtless culture extending back before the Industrial
Revolution, but intensified after that epoch, has persistently restricted us from being near to things.
As such, what presences fails to be concernfully approached, fails to be near to us, but
instead presences as distanceless objects void of meaning, thought, or consideration.

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Slavery (1)
Calculative thinking enslaves humans to tech
Heidegger 66
[Excerpt from: Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and
Row, 1966: 44-46. MV]
This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world.
This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in
it. The

world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks
that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such,
in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was
altogether alien to former ages and histories.
The power

concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which

exists. It rules the whole earth. Indeed, already man is beginning to advance beyond the earth into
outer space. In not quite twenty years, such gigantic sources of power have become known through the discovery of atomic energy that in the
foreseeable future the world's demands for energy of any kind will be ensured forever. Soon the procurement of the new energies will no longer be tied to
certain countries and continents, as is the occurrence of coal, oil, and timber. In the foreseeable future it will be possible to build atomic power stations
anywhere on earth.
Thus the decisive question of science and technology today is no longer: Where do we find sufficient quantities of fuel? The decisive question now runs:
In what way can we tame and direct the unimaginably vast amounts of atomic energies, and so secure mankind against the danger that these gigantic
energies suddenly even without military actions break out somewhere, "run away" and destroy everything?

What we
know now as the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air
transportation, of news reporting, and as medical and nutritional technology, is 3
presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come.
But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped . In all areas of
his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and
every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of
some technical contrivance or otherthese forces, since man has not made them, have
moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.
But this too is characteristic of the new world of technology, that its accomplishments
come most speedily to be known and publicly admired. Thus today everyone will be able to read what this talk
If the taming of atomic energy is successful, and it will be successful, then a totally new era of technical development will begin.

says about technology in any competently managed picture magazine or hear it on the radio. Butit is one thing to have heard and read something, that is,
merely to take notice: it is another thing to understand what we have heard and read, that is, to ponder.
The international meeting of Nobel Prize winners took place again in the summer of this year of 1955 in Lindau. There the American chemist, Stanley,
had this to say: "The

hour is near when life will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will
be able to synthesize, split and change living substance at will." We take notice of such a
statement. We even marvel at thc daring of scientific research, without thinking about
it. We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared
upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen
bomb means little.
For precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life on earth is
preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves upon us.
Yet it is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more
uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront
meditatively what is really dawning in this age.
No single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and
industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the atomic age. No

merely human organization is capable of

gaining dominion over it.
Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible
superior power of technology? He would be if man today abandons any intention to pit
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meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But once meditative
thinking awakens, it must be at work unceasingly and on every last occasion.

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Slavery (2)
Viewing the world as standing-reserve is akin to slavery and conceals being
Zimmerman 94
(Michael, Professor + Chair of Philosophy @ Tulane, Contesting Earths Future, p. 116)
According to Heidegger, animals are not so much inferior to as they are different from humans. 38In failing to note this distinction, modern humanists
and Darwinists conceive of humankind as the clever animal, that is, as a monstrous, half-human, half-animal hybrid. Humanists portray as "natural" the
clever animal's craving for pleasure, power, and control. But although the cravings of this hybrid may seem similar to the drives of animals, there is an

humans
really desire being, but being has increasingly concealed itself. Hence, humankind's
ontological desire has been diverted into a craving for entities. But consuming even an
infinite amount of entities cannot slake the desire for being, which "is" not an entity. The
monstrous animal-human hybrid claims that it is free, in having license to acquire ever greater wealth and power, but Heidegger said that striving
for the merely "useful" is akin to slavery: the monstrous hybrid is "unbound in the
sphere of compulsion."" The clever animal's unlimited cravings push things beyond their own proper limit. Disclosed
according to technological modernity's one-dimensional framing (Gestell), things show
themselves only as raw material.
important difference: animal drives are self-limiting, whereas the cravings of the clever animal lack such limits. The reason is simple:

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Environmental Destruction/Ontology
The affirmatives engagement in calculative thought inherently views the world as
standing reserve this replicates environmental destruction
Housman and Flynn 2011
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]
This notion (i.e. the distancelessness of our world and failure to consider the thing as thing) sets the stage for Heideggers next lecture, Positionality.
Now that Heidegger has established this distancelessness in relation to the thing, he proceeds to expand the scope of this thought beyond one particular
thing (e.g. the jug in his lecture The Thing) but instead in relation to everythingin our entire way of relating to the world. He says, [This distanceless]
stands insofar as everything that presences is standing reserveThe standing reserve persists. It persists insofar as it is imposed upon for a
requisitioning. Directed into requisitioning, it is placed into application (1951, 2-3; my italics). This

notion of relating to the

world as standing reserve is at the core of Heideggers thought. It refers to a way of perceiving the world
that does not consider the thing as thing; instead, it considers the thing for our
application and thereby encourages us to requisition, order, call upon, and marshal our surroundings for the benefit of our use. This
notion of application is exemplified not only in the use of a particular technological
device (e.g. using a computer for a specific, results-oriented purpose), but more broadly speaking in how we approach the
world. We approach the world in terms of how things can be applied, largely for the sake of generating desired results. We then order
the 29 world, as standing reserve, in such a way that those results can be realized and
achieved, while all along forgetting about the thing as thing and failing to concernfully
approach that which presences.
Heidegger speaks of the agricultural industry and the Rhine River to underscore how things are now standing as standing-reserve to be marshaled and
positioned. He says, Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and
extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs (1951, 2-6).

Regarding the Rhine River, he says, The hydroelectric plant is placed in the river. It

imposes upon it for water pressure, which sets the turbines turning, the turning of which drives the machines, the gearing of which imposes upon the
electrical current through which the long distance power centers and their electrical grid are positioned for the conducting of electricity (1951, 2-6).
While equating the motorized food industry to the production of corpses in gas chambers may be interpreted as a distasteful and offensive comparison,

No longer do we relate
to the Rhine as thingas the beautiful River that we are connected to, that we dwell
around, as part of Being. On the contrary, it is approached for the sake of its consequences, for
the sake of producing electricity, which in turn powers our televisions, which in turn
defines how we plan our days, etc. etc. Indeed, Heidegger defines this self-gathered collection of positioning (1951, 2-11) as
Heideggers intentional bluntness and lack of reservation emphasizes the gravity and ubiquity of this positioning.

positionality [das Ge-Stell], and, according to Heidegger, it is in this positionality wherein the essence of technology lies.
So why does it matter that we now live in a positioned world exemplified by our new relationship to the Rhine as standing reserve? Positionality removes
us from our natural environmentthe environment that provides the materials that we then convert into energy and use to power our devices. When we
turn on our computers, lights, cars, etc. rarely do we reflect on the process and resources that allow for us to operate our machines. For example, when
we turn the lights on in a room, hardly ever do we say to ourselves: I am glad we have that hydroelectric plant in the Rhine, which converted that water
energy into electricity using a turbine, which was then shot through power lines into my home, producing the effect I am now witnessing with this lit
light bulb. Positionality, as exemplified here in the power grid, causes us to take for granted our natural environment. This unappreciative attitude that
defines the technological culture we live in today does not encourage people to concernfully approach things and our worldinstead it distances us from
the very environment that is such a part of our essence as beings in this world. Herein lies the problem: because we are so immersed in this positioned
world that induces us to take nature for granted, we do not realize that turning on that light bulb actually has real consequences for our environment,
such as producing global warming. In addition, the technological, positioned world also removes us from caring for and guarding our environment, and
Heidegger proceeds in his lecture by stressing the danger of positionality.

positionality is the danger; it refuses the

world and unguards the thing as thing. This notion of guardianship has been argued by
many environmental ethicists to underscore 31 our responsibility as humans to protect
our earth. In many cases the position is asserted with religious motives (i.e., God created us as stewards and we have a responsibility to guard and
In his next lecture, appropriately entitled The Danger, Heidegger claims that

preserve this earth). Regardless of the theological ties, however, Heidegger strongly believes that man has a responsibility to guard the thing, to guard
Being. He says in his originally published 1947 Letter on Humanism, Man

is rather thrown from Being itself into

the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting [existing] in this fashion he might guard the truth of
Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of Being as the beings they are
Man is the shepherd of Being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as
care (1993 [1947], 234). Heidegger reiterates this notion of guardianship in his Bremen lecture three years later when he says, In the
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essence of positionality the thing remains unguarded as thing (1951, 3-1). Positionality
threatens our essence insofar as it steers us away from guarding the earth, from
experiencing the world with care. As alluded to earlier, in the context of global
warming this means that the modern technological world, described in short as our
relation to things as standing reserve to be ordered and positioned, repels us from our
essence, as shepherds of Being, and helps explain why we are faced with this
environmental crisis.

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***ROOT CAUSE***

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Generic
Technological enframing is the root cause of militarism, geopolitics, economic
exploitation, and ecological destruction. It locks us into discursive constraints which do
not allow us to think in other ways. We must stop the technological mindset to stop the
root of the impacts.
Burke 07
[Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney. Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, John Hopkins
University Press, Project Muse]
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I

have sought to extend by analyzing the militaristic power of

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

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Terrorism
Mechanization and Western technology are the root causes of Islamic terrorism
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]

Heideggers approach to political concepts and rhetoric is almost always illuminating.

His metaphysical genealogies of the key elements of political worldviews help us to
reflect more deeply on ideologies that tend to cover up their own historical roots.
Sometimes he seems prescient: his concept of peace as the domination of the means of war anticipates the Cold War, and his insights can also be applied
to the early twenty-first century with little effort. In North Korea, the concept of total mobilization has been applied to every aspect of life, keeping the

Attempting to
resist the West, Islamic radicals have borrowed Western technology and ideas, creating
a religious form of this subjectivist self-reliance. The American response has been
marked by a hubristic confidence in the self-evidence of liberal principles and the
irresistibility of American power, a hubris that has been punished by what it could not
calculate. Meanwhile, the Earth suffers the effects of being treated as a supply of
natural resources, while the most influential discussions of our environment
continue to assume that we face a technical problema problem about how to manage
resourcesand not a question about the very being of nature.
population in a constant state of readiness for war in the name of national survival and an abstract idea (juche or selfreliance).

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Anthropocentrism
A Technological View of Earth Pushes Us Into Anthropocentrism because we see
everything as having no inherent relationship. Other species and animals become less
than objects to us allowing the justification of an anthropocentric view of the world.
Turnbull '06
[Neil, the Subject Leader of the Philosophy subject team at Nottingham Trent Univeristy, The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus, Theory,
Culture & Society Journal, 2006, Vol. 23(1): 125-139, DOI: 10.1177/0263276406063232, Page 131 - 132,]
Thus, for the later Heidegger worlds are only conceivable as such such that the world is attained as world only when they framed by the sky above
and the earth beneath (see Malpas, 2000: 227). Clearly, for the later Heidegger, the

idea of the world is conceptually

inseparable from that of the earth (and in many ways, for the later Heidegger, the idea of the world within which Dasein is is
replaced by the idea of the fourfold within which man dwells). The close relationship between earth and world for Heidegger can again be seen in the
Origins of the Work of Art, where Heidegger recognizes that [w]orld and earth are essentially different from one
another and yet never separated. The world grounds itself in the earth and the earth
juts through the world (1978b: 174).2 When seen in this way, the earth is viewed as forming
the ontological basis for what Heidegger terms the work of both artist and artisan and its corollary the thingly
character of the world (1978b: 180). More generally, Heidegger conceives the earth as the ground of all
appearance and the physys out of which the world emerges (a ground that supports the nomos of the world). For, in Heideggers view, only
a world supported by the earth can give things their proper measure: and without this
relation, things have no true measure (and in such a case, the measurement of the world in
terms of an abstract [end of page 132] mathematicized facticity required for the efficient
maintenance of purely technological relationships becomes the anthropocentric
measure of all things).

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Nihilism
The alternative commits to ontological reflection, which is critical for overcoming
Nihilism.
Dreyfus 06
[Hubert. Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, Heidegger on the Connection between Nihlism, Art, Technology, and Politics,
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/HdgerOnArtTechPoli.pdf]
In his lectures on Nietzsche in 1936 Heidegger quotes with approval Nietzsche's Kierkegaardian condemnation of the present age: Around the year 1882
[Nietzsche] says regarding his times, "Our age is an agitate one, and precisely for that reason, not an age of passion; it heats itself up continuously,
because it feels that it is not warm -- basically it is freezing.... In our time it is merely by means of an echo that events acquire their `greatness' -- the echo

"There is no longer any goal in and through

which all the forces of the historical existence of peoples can cohere and in the
direction of which they can develop". 4 Nihilism is Nietzsche's name for this loss of
meaning or direction. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agree that if nihilism were complete, there would be no significant private or
of the newspapers" (XII, 343-344). 3 Heidegger agrees with Nietzsche that

public issues. Nothing would have authority for us, would make a claim on us, would demand a commitment from us. In a non-nihilistic age there is
something at stake; there are questions that all can agree are important, even if they violently disagree as to what the answers to these questions are. But

in our age, everything is in the process of becoming equal . There is less and less difference between political
parties, between religious communities, between social causes, between cultural practices -- everything is on a par, all meaningful
differences are being leveled. Kierkegaard thought that the answer to nihilism was to make one's
own individual absolute commitment. If you can commit yourself unconditionally -- in love for instance
-- then that becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede
into insignificance on the basis of that ultimate concern . One doesnot discover a significance that is already
there. There is no basis for this commitment in the cosmos. Indeed, such a commitment is exactly the opposite of belief in an objective truth. You are

either a person or a cause -- and when you define yourself by your

dedication to that concern, your world acquires seriousness, and significance . The only way to
called by some concrete concern --

have a meaningful life in the present age, then, is to let your involvement become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is
not something that is in any way provisional -- although it certainly is vulnerable. That is why, once

a society like ours becomes

rational and reflective, such total commitments begin to look like a kind of dangerous
dependency. The committed individual is identified as a workaholic or a woman who
loves too much. This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth
pursuing. But as our culture comes more and more to celebrate critical detachment, selfsufficiency, and rational choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments. So,
commitment itself beings to look like craziness. Thus Heidegger comes to see the recent
undermining of commitment as due not so much to a failure on the part of the
individual, as to a lack of anything in the modern world that could solicit commitment
from us and sustain us in it. The things that once evoked commitment --gods, heroes, the God-man, the acts of greatstatesmen, the
words of great thinkers -- have lost their authority. As a result, individuals feel isolated and alienated. They
feel that their lives have no meaning because the public world contains no guidelines.
When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab,
people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find
significance. Heidegger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, religion, sex, education all becomes
varieties of experiences. When all our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of "experience" we will have reached the last stage of
nihilism. One then sees "the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The `lived experience' as such becomes decisive."

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Freedom
Freedom demands a openness to being and a letting-be.
Thiele '95 [Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.75)]
Summing up Schelling's thesis, Heidegger

remarks that freedom demands pantheism (ST 85). That is,

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

And the alternative's key to releasement and openness to being which allows for
freedom
Thiele '95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.94)]

Disclosive freedom is facilitated by releasement toward things and openness to the mystery of Being. But
this is not to say that freedom is achieved without effort and enjoyed in passivity. Heidegger insists that "releasement toward things
and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us
accidentally. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous thinking" (DT 56).
Persistent, courageous thinking provides the foundation on which disclosive freedom
gains its foothold in the world. Indeed, there is a unique and original freedom to be practiced in thought itself.

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Totalitarianism
Only the alternatives pluralistic Being bring down authoritarianism. Status quo
metaphysics ensure that authoritarianism happens by ignoring the pluralities of
metaphysics.
Vattimo 03
[Gianni Vattimo, Philosophy Professor, University of Turin, and member of the EU Parliament, Nihilism & Emancipation, Edited Satiago Zabala,
Translated William McCuaig, pg. 65-69]
"Compelle intrare"-the slogan that justified Christian missionaries in using force to convert the pagans they encountered in the new lands that became
colonies of Christian powers "for

their own good"-is one of the well-known consequences of the

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

the end of colonialism and the discovery of the

existence of other cultures that resist being assigned a backward and primitive place on
an evolutionary line leading to western civilization. They are not "absolute" reasons, they flow from
no essence: it would after all be a contradiction to claim to demonstrate in absolute terms the positive significance of a process that has dissolved
all absolutes. Yet despite all, the historical reasons to which I refer are persuasive to this extent: it is hard to find anyone who
denies that the recognition of the plurality of cultures and the rejection of a Eurocentric
historicist model are positive steps toward achieving a "better" form of rationality . Even
admitting that there is nothing absolute about these last arguments, a shared criterion does appear to emerge. At the least it seems undeniable that the
emancipatory significance of the dissolution of metaphysical absoluteness understood
in this way is widely shared, is a matter of common sense-so that the burden of proof falls on whoever defends the opposite view,
and it is hard to find anyone fitting that description.

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Biopower
The technological mindset manifests itself in the form of biopower that renders all life
to standing reserve
Dean 2000
[Sociologist at Macquarie University (Mitchell, "Always Look on the Dark Side: Politics and the Meaning of Life",
http://apsa2000.anu.edu.au/confpapers/dean.rtf).JRC]
Aristotle said that while the polis comes into existence for the sake of life, its exists for the good life (1967, 9, I.i.8). Today the good life has come to
require a politics for the sake of life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we appear to be crossing ever-new thresholds towards learning the

Rarely a week goes by when there is not a new biotechnological

discovery or application which allows us to use and manipulate the processes of life itself for any number
secrets of the creation of life itself.

of ends. Post-menopausal women can now bear children. Infertile women and men can become parents. The genes from an animal can be implanted into
a vegetable. Sheep and other animals can be cloned. Evidence of criminality or innocence can be discovered through DNA testing. With the Human
Genome Project in competition with private companies engaged in completing the map of the human genome, we are issued with extraordinary
promises in disease detection, prevention and eradication. We are also issued with warnings concerning designer babies, the new eugenics, and the uses
of genetic information by governments, private companies and employers. The possibilities for the

manipulation of the very

biological processes life are not limited to what has been called the genetic age made possible
by molecular biology and human genetics. There are advances in organ transplantation and in our medical capacities to sustain life. All of these
processes of the manipulation of life contain what we like to think of as ethical
questions. Notions of brain death and the ensuing futility of further attempts to restore normal life functioning redefine problems of
euthanasia. Various forms of prenatal testing and screening of pregnant women redefine the conditions of acceptability of abortions. Other such ethical
questions concern the harvesting of organs for transplantation, or of the maintenance of the integrity and diversity of biological species in the face of

The capacity to manipulate our mere biological life, rather than

simply to govern aspects of forms of life, implies a bio-politics that contests how and
when we use these technologies and for what purposes. It also implies a redrawing of the relations between life
genetically modified crops and seeds, etc.

and death, and a new thanato-politics, a new politics of death. At some distance from these advances in biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of
life and death that are played in various arenas of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states
from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention and mass death of refugees and illegal immigrants, and the
conditions and forms under which military action, peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention are acceptable. Detention camps are becoming a
feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the one hand, the twentieth century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or race, genocide.
On the other, it sought to promote the universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human beings. Biopolitics and thanato-politics
are played out in war, in torture, and in biological, chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in declarations of human rights and
United Nations peacekeeping operations. The potentialities for the care and the manipulation of the biological processes of life and of the powers of
death have never appeared greater than they do today. But how do we consider this problem as a political problem? How are issues of life and death
related to our conceptions of politics and to the way in which we think about states and societies, and their futures? Are the ideas of powers of life and
death peculiarly modern, or do they lie at a deeper strata?

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Capitalism
Ontological thinking is key to confront capitalism
Joronen 2011
[Mikko, Dept. of Geography, U. of Turku, Finland, Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe, Antipode, 0(0).]
The present paper concentrates on showing how lack

of awareness about the grounding dimension of

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

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Democracy
Only by challenging the tenants and practices of democracy can one achieve true
democracy. The alternative allows people to see their relationship with the world and
allow for the people to maintain being people.
Zizek 08
[Slavoj, iek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School.[4] He
has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York
University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the
International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical
Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana (In defense of lost causes p.102-104 )//Collin//JRC]
However, Brown takes here a crucial step further and pushes all the paradoxes of democracy to the end, more radically than Chantal Mouffe did with her
"democratic paradox." Already with Spinoza and Tocqueville, it became clear that democracy

is in itself inchoate empty, lacking a firm

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

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

discerns the same ambiguous link in the

relationship between state and people: in the same way that democracy needs anti-democracy to
rejuvenate itself, the state needs the people's resistance to rejuvenate itself: Only through the state are
the people constituted as a people; only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people. Thus,
just as democracy requires antidemocratic critique in order to remain democratic, so
too the democratic state may require democratic resistance rather than fealty if it is not
to become the death of democracy. Similarly, democracy may require theory's provision of unlivable critiques and unreachable
ideals.

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Distance from the Other

An authentic relationship with the other is not based only of nearness, but distance.
The 1ac dream of encountering new worlds is an act of ontological colonizationan
ethical relationship can only begin in that gap between self and the other. Any other
relation will only produce a non-being.
Guenther 02
[Lisa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy, Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 7(2), Spring]
Ethos anthropoi daimon. In light of Heideggers translation, I propose that we interpret these words as follows: The

dwelling of human
beingsour essential character, our everyday habits, and the very root of our ethics
exists not only in the nearness of, but at a distance from, an other that both surpasses
me and makes me what I am. We can think of this other as a spirit or intermediary, or as the human community; but we can
also think of the other as the entire human and more-than-human world : the plants, animals,
elements, and people with whom we inhabit the earth. An ethics of dwelling emerges from the preservation of
a tension between this nearness to others, and the distance which keeps us distinct
from others. The gap between myself and the other is the space which makes ethical
dwelling possible; in keeping us apart, it also preserves the difference which makes an
ethical relation possible. For this is the paradox articulated by fragment 119: that I am only myself in being divided, that I can only
become myself by risking my identity in proximity to others. In effect, the boundary that separates me from a blade of grass, or from the moose across

Often we are tempted

by the romantic idea of fusing consciousness with the natural world, denying that
there is a difference which keeps us apart from others and, precisely in keeping us
apart, also directs us towards them. But the very possibility of an environmental ethics of dwelling rests upon the twofold
the river, is precisely that which grants me the possibility of approaching, addressing, and giving to these others.

nearness and distinction from others whom we need and for whom we are responsible. In the pages that follow, I will reflect more concretely on this
relation between nearness and distance, or relation and otherness, which emerges from my re-translation of Heideggers translation of ethos anthropoi
daimon. I shall argue that an

ethical relation with the natural world is only possible given the gap
of difference or otherness which is maintained by setting a boundary or limit to our
dwelling-space. This boundary, far from alienating us from the natural environment,
actually forms the basis for an environmental ethics of dwelling. Consider also an apartment in the city.
Cities are more like beehives. When I look out a city window (turning away from the television, opening the curtains and blinds, and peering out over the
back of the couch), I see houses just like my own, arranged into rows like cells in a honeycomb. They are inhabited by people more or less like me: people
who work, come home, make spaghetti for dinner, fall asleep during the news. And yet I can walk through this city and see things that surprise me: a
man with green hospital pants tied around his head, calmly walking his dog. A cat stalking a bird. Fireweed pushing through a crack in the sidewalk. For
cities leak too, even in spite of themselves. The air conditioning may be on, the stereo may be blaring; but a storm outside can knock this out in less than
a minute. Thus cities tend to show themselves most clearly just there, where they fail: a robins nest in the mailbox; a leaking tap; the sound of an
argument next door. In these moments of disruption we realize what the city tries most to conceal: that we dwell in relation to others, and that we can
only be there if others are there, too. While the cabin and the apartment are undoubtedly very different sorts of dwelling-space, both offer a glimpse into
the ethical significance of dwelling. While there is much to say here, I want to focus on one aspect in particular: the relation between inside and outside
in a home. The inside of a place can exist only thanks to the boundary (the walls, floor, and roof) which separates it from the outside. Without this sense
of a place hollowed out from the world at large, there could be no dwelling, no intimacy, no home in which I welcome friends and strangers. The
boundary that separates inside from outside need not be visible or material; for even among people who dwell under the open sky, there is the sense of a
socially interior space, a space which is described more by trails and hunting grounds than by walls and floorboards. Dwelling requires a sense of the
inside: an intimate space where I belong with others who do not, properly speaking, belong to me. If the boundary which creates this interior space were
absolute and impermeable, then life within its bounds would be impossible. We need windows and doors; we need wood for the stove and air to breathe.
Thus dwelling

occurs neither inside nor outside but in the tension between the two: in the
interaction of spaces which have something to give one another precisely because they
are not the same. The dwelling of human beings, the root of our ethics and the very
character of our existence, occurs in the nearness of, but distinction from, an other, an
outside, a complex of human and more-than-human beings who both transcend me,
and let me become who I am. Though our contemporary cities have largely neglected this tension between inside and outside,

ancient Greek cities were founded upon the principle of a boundary or city wall, which both sets limits on the citys proper sphere, and establishes a
connection between the human community and the cosmos in which it dwells. In his book, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich (1985)
describes the way Greek cities were ritually traced out upon the earth in relation to heavenly bodies, the flight of birds, or the movement of clouds. For
the Greeks, a city could only be founded in relation to that which exceeds it, that which is not the city but nevertheless is the condition for its very
existence. An ethos of ritual and custom inaugurated the city once a site 42 Lisa Guenther had been divined; a team of one female and one male ox pulled

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a plough around the cosmic shape of the city, the driver lifting the plough at intervals to make thresholds or city gates, places where the interior would
meet and interact with the external world. Illich (1985) calls this ritual of inauguration a sacred marriage of heaven and earth (p. 15), an opposition
and wedding of right and left, inside and outside, animal and human (p. 14). Without this collaboration of more-than-human othersthe stars, the
clouds, the oxen, the birds, and the ground into which the template is etchedthe human city could not come into being. And yet this relation between
the city and the more-thancity only comes into view when the city-space is marked off from that which exceeds it and from which it emerges. The Greeks,
we might say, had an ethos of city-dwelling: an understanding that human beings need to dwell with one another, but that we can only do so by dwelling
within the limits of a boundary which both separates us from and aligns us with an exterior which is other-than-human and more-thanhuman. One could
argue, of course, that the Greeks built walls around their cities not because of their deep sensitivity to the nature of ethical dwelling, but rather to protect
themselves from armies and barbarians and beasts from the wild. For it is also trueand especially true in the history of the Westthat boundaries
have been erected in the spirit of exclusion and self-protection rather than in pursuit of harmonious dwelling. Thus we must turn to the past not in order
to repeat its mistakes, but rather to learn how not to repeat them; we need the retrospective gaze of history not only to find inspiration for the future
from the past, but also to mark the line which separates past from future, and opens a different horizon. The Greeks may not have conceived the city wall
as a boundary which separates and connects humanity with the more-than-human world; and Heraclitus may not have understood his words as the
starting-point for environmental ethics. And yet, when we remember these ancient words and customs, we are given the responsibility to hear both what
has been said in the past, and how this saying resonates for the future. For Heidegger, to remember is not to make the past present through representation, but rather to preserve from the past a meaning which exists ecstatically in relation to the future. By letting an ethical sense of the boundary
address the traditional history of the boundary as an instrument of exploitation and self-assertion, we open up the possibility of new meanings for old
words. We need to remember the history of Western culture in this way in order to understand why our own cities are the way they are, and how they
could be otherwise. We

cannot change the way we dwell simply by wiping the slate clean and
starting over; any change in habits must arise first from an examination of our current
habits and the conditions under which they were formed . For Ivan Illich (1985), To dwell means to inhabit
the traces left by ones own living, by which one always retraces the lives of ones ancestors (p. 8). What does this sense of dwelling mean for the future
of our cities? Drive into Vancouver or Toronto Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling 43 for one cannot help but drive thereand witness the
hundreds of kilometres of occupied space sprawling out of our mega-cities. This is no longer dwelling space, but rather what Illich calls garages for

Now, more than ever, we need to recuperate a sense of

dwelling within limits: not in order to protect ourselves from the wilderness (as perhaps the
ancient Greeks were concerned to do) but rather to protect the wilderness from ourselves. We must do
this not only because our physical existence depends upon it, but also because without this relation to,
and distinction from, others we cannot become who we are: namely, human beings whose
character is our ethos. And yet we cannot stop here. For ultimately, and more essentially, we must set a limit to
human dwelling not for our own sake, but for the sake of the other, making room for an other not out
living, storage-space for human enterprise.

of enlightened self-interest, but out of respect and hospitality. I propose, arising from this brief exploration of dwelling as thought and as experience, an
environmental ethics grounded in these gestures of respect and hospitality. To respect someone is to hold her in regard while still letting her remain at a
distance from me, giving her room to move. Respect

thrives only where this distance and difference is

maintained in the very midst of my regard and concern for the other. Likewise to offer
hospitalitya notion which I have inherited from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1969) is to open ones dwelling
space to an other, a stranger whom I cannot grasp or comprehend but for whom I am
nevertheless responsible. To be hospitable is, like the gift of respect, to take a step back
so that the other can step forth; it is to set limits on my own dwelling so that the other
has room to come and go. The genius of human being is not only that we can be ourselves only in relation to an other which both
surpasses and constitutes us. Rather, the genius of the human character, and the root of our ethics, is in
our propensity to give space, or make room for, an other who exceeds our grasp . An ethics of
respect and hospitality has political, social, and intellectual implications. In concrete terms, it means that we ought to set aside wilderness spaces that
have no human function, not even the relatively benign function of providing recreation for people like you and me. It means that we ought to rethink
our cities in terms of density rather than sprawl, and to preserve within them spaces of otherness and ecological diversity: parkland spaces without
mowed lawns and barbeque pits. And it means that in our everyday lives, as well as in our municipal and territorial planning, we must cultivate habits of
respect for those with whom we dwell, and without whom we could not exist .

An ethics of dwelling based on hospitality

and respect demands that we resist the temptation to believe, even in a spirit of
generosity, that we are the same as the other, that there is no difference between a
person and a tree and a lynx across the river. For although we are by no means indifferent to these others, it is precisely
our difference from them, our not knowing who they are from the inside out, that lets us be ethical
towards them. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1991) ends his book, Language and Death, with the following words, and this is
where I, too, will conclude these reflections upon the ethos of dwelling: We walk through the woods: suddenly we hear the flapping of wings or the wind
in the grass. A pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees, a porcupine buries in the thick underbrush, the dry leaves crackle as a
snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this flight of invisible animals is thought. No, it was not our voice. We came as close as possible to language,
we almost brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn back, untroubled, toward home. So, language is
our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics. (p. 108)

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Warming
Attempts to reduce global warming are futile The quick fix actions are rooted in the
technological mindset which initially produced the problem
Hill 07
[Glenn, Associate Professor, Coordinator M. Arch Sustainable Architecture Studio, Director of the Master of Architecture program, has extensively
researched Heidegger, DESIGN WITHOUT CAUSALITY: HEIDEGGERS IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE FOR ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE
ARCHITECTURE, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/474]

With modernitys belief that

causality in nature could be understood and therefore controlled, technologies have been
increasingly deployed with the confidence that their outcomes can be predicted. While
the design of each individual technologically mediated intervention would have been
intended to cause a (local) beneficial outcome for some portion of humanity (grounded in care in Heideggers terms),
their cumulative impact on the ecological systems of the planet is now considered by
many to be potentially catastrophic. If this scenario is accepted, then design could be characterised
as the well-intentioned engine driving the proliferation of technologies that now
threatens the planet. Designers, and not least architects, are enframed within a view of causality which instils confidence that designed
outcomes have predictable effects. Tellingly, this confidence is no less evident in the responses to the
perceived ecological crisis, where design is confidently being advocated to develop
solutions to overcome the very problems that confident designing has created . Confirming
At this point, the implications for ecological sustainability and for design also become clear.

such a view of the designer, Heidegger refers to the engineer in his drafting room (which could equally be the architect in his/her studio) as being part
of an enframed system, an executer, within Enframing (Question, 29). Modernitys understanding that the entities constituting our universe are a
particular way and operate under the rule of causality, marks a momentous shift: in pre-modernity nature is apprehended as mysterious and marvellous;
in modernity nature is apprehended as systematic and operable. This

shift is, for me, no better illustrated than in the

surreal (yet quite serious) design for a solar umbrella consisting of trillions of satellites
launched from earth and intended to stop global warming (Brahic). The pre-modern
understanding of the mystery and wonder of the suns warmth granting life to all beings on earth (for
many pre-modern cultures the sun and God were one), has shifted to a modern understanding where the suns
warming of the earth is a calculable system that we do not merely believe we can
understand, but have the hubris to believe that we can control.

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***REJECTION ALTERNATIVE***

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Rejection Key
Only by ceasing to believe in technological managerialism can we establish a new
relationship to technology and the world
Smith 91
(Gregory, Department of Poly Sci @ Univ. of Michigan, "Heidegger, Technology, and Postmodernity," Social Science Journal, Vol 28, Issue 3, p.
ebscohost)

if modern man is ever to transcend the technological revelation of Reality, he

must first come into a new relation to technology . That means he must cease to understand
technology in the traditional fashion. For example, man must cease to see himself as its
master and controller and cease to see technology as a neutral tool. Heidegger feels that his novel understanding of technology helps accomplish
According to Heidegger,

this new relation.

From out

of that new understanding it is possible that a new relationship to Reality can

eventually emerge. Until now modern man has seen technology as the benign tool by which he fashioned his emancipation, liberation, equality and
humanity. When

we cease to see technology in the proto-modern fashion a new relation to

technology has begun. When we come to see that we tighten our chains in trying to
willfully quit the grips of the modern technological view of Reality we have likewise
come into a new relationship to our world.

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Alt Spills Over

Rejecting technological Managerialism spillsover and creates a new understanding and
relation of reality
Smith 91
(Gregory, Department of Poly Sci @ Univ. of Michigan, "Heidegger, Technology, and Postmodernity," Social Science Journal, Vol 28, Issue 3, p.
ebscohost)
In the modern understanding, modern technology has been depicted as a benign tool that makes our liberation from Nature feasible, thereby making our

By presenting technology
as a danger--and again, Heidegger is not alone in this--and subjectivism as metaphysical, one presents a new
understanding that reveals in a new way. As a result we are forced to take a new relation to
it. That new relation will have different ramifications than the one that saw technology as
a benign instrumentality that is philosophically and political neutral, and masterable by autonomous "subjects." Thinking the
essence of modernity as technological, and technology as Enframing, is a new way of viewing realty. Changes in thought go forward first. By
radically questioning, and probably negating, the legitimacy of a previous mode of thought a whole
train of consequences is set in motion. Precisely what those consequences will be can never be entirely predictable. Thought
political equality a possibility, our self-determining individualism conceivable, mass democracy a reality.

does not have any one-to-one causal relationship to concrete changes. Nonetheless, it surely has ramifications.

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Thought Key
The Affirmative mistakenly answers the question of what shall we do instead of what
shall we thinkcriticism is a prerequisite to effective action and allows us to expose
the hegemony of technological thought
Botha 02
(Catherine, Dept. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Pretoria, Heidegger, Technology and Ecology, South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol 22, Issue 2, p.
ebscohost)
Attempts to force Heidegger's ideas into a frame work of action forget his intention of escaping the wilfulness inherent to the technological attitude. He
tells us explicitly that Human activity can never directly counter this danger. Human achievement alone can never banish it. But human reflection can
ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it (Heidegger 1993:399).
The question asked at the beginning of this article is therefore inappropriate in the context of Heidegger's views on technology. Heidegger wants us to
respond to the question what shall we think? rather than what shall we do?. Thought

must first save us from our typical

modes of behaving, namely those oriented towards possessive mastery, before we can move to action. Heidegger tells
us that [t]hinking does not become action only be cause some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts in so far it thinks.
Such action is presumably the simplist and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man (Heidegger, 1993:217). In this

the question of what we should do in the face of the technological crisis we are experiencing
can only be meaningful in terms of what we should think. Trying to force Heidegger's work into an
ecological frame - work of action might convert it into the very willing which it is trying to escape. In our time, the world will remain
largely technological, but we can launch an incisive critique of technology that exposes the
hegemony of its present reign. From this the saving power could grow . Admittedly, Heidegger does not give us much in
sense,
to day

terms of a political programme for change in terms of action, but in view of his definition of technology, this is warranted.

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Criticism Key
The Affirmative's conception of the world is shaped by technological ordering and must
be interrogated. Critique is key to do so and takes out the roots of their impacts.
Korous 97
(George, Yale Law Graduate, Copeland Winner, Become What You Are , p. 22-25)

The thought that habits critique is not bent on achieving quick and efficient solutions.
Nor is critique simply a means for some eventual action; for Foucault, the distinction between theory and
practice is shallow, as thought is a practice, and practice is always informed by thought. Yet despite the close relationship between thought and action,

the practice of critique operates according to a mode of thought quite different from the
calculative thinking that dries technological practices. This other mode of thinking is what Heidegger
would call "meditative thought." Meditative thought is characterized by its disengagement from
the technological imperative to react. This is not to say that meditative thought does
not result in action, but rather, thought is not reducible to action, as if its only function
were to usher in a solution: "thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied" (LH
217) Thought has value in and of itself. It allows us to take stock of out ontological
situation. As Foucault explains, Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning, rather it is what allows one to step back
away from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions, its goals.
Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, and establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a
problem. (PPP 388) Heidegger echoes these sentiments when he writes, "Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and

The calculative mode of engaging the

world is forever asking, "What should I do?"; it is bent on producing immediate and
practical solutions. Problems take on an urgency that demand quick action, and
calculative thought eschews the task of thinking as a luxury that cannot be afforded. But
as Heidegger points out, "All attempts to reckon existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in
terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe and destruction, are merely technologically
behavior. That behavior operates through the device of the enumerating of symptoms whose standing-reserve can be increased to infinity and
always varied anew" (T48). The call for action already operates with the understanding that the
world is an ordered whole that can be manipulated as necessary to avoid immanent
danger. As long as reality is problematized as one crisis after the other, action will always
beat out thought as the preferred mode of engagement. For Heidegger and Foucault both, this kneejerk sense of action is systemically destined to produce nothing but more of the same. By
failing to engage problems at the level of thought, that is, the level at which the problem
is understood as a problem for thought, the imperative to act merely operates on
superficial features of reality, applying band-aids to wounds when the real injury is
festering way beneath the surface. The first step in overcoming the calculative understanding of reality is to recognize that it is
only one understanding among many. This is much more difficult than it might sound. First of all, the calculative mode of
revealing the world, Enframing, is something that conceals itself in the process of revealing the world (QT 27). The
mode of revealing is so pervasive that it is invisible to us, unless we reflect on it. When we are mired in the concerns of the
the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called into question."

everyday, Enframing is not encountered, it is only lived. That is, as someone thinking technologically, reality reveals itself to me as a series of objects. I
am attuned to that objectness when I am engaging with the world. Precisely because

Enframing is not an object, but a

mode of revealing, it itself will not show up within my observational field. In order for
me to confront technological thought for what it is, a way of revealing, I have to be prepared to
momentarily suspend my calculative mode of thinking and pursue ontological
questions. Second, the continued successes of technological thought blinds us to the fact
that it is only an interpretation of reality and not reality in itself . As Heidegger warns, "The approaching
tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be
accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking" (DT 56). For every time that a scientific theory pans out, or technological planning achieves desired
ends, we are less capable of viewing technology as only one of many different ways to reveal the world. Heidegger is not arguing that science is false or
useless. In fact, he recognizes that technological representations of reality often do allow us to make correct determinations about the world: "In a similar
way the unconcealment in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex of the effects of forces can indeed permit correct

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determinations; but precisely through these successes the danger can remain that in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw" (QT 26). While
it might be the case that a river that can yield a calculable amount of hydropower, this does not mean that the river is, in its essence, a source of energy.
But for every power plant built on a river it becomes increasingly more difficult to appreciate that rivers are not primarily stockpiles of potential energy
waiting to be unleashed. It is important to note that Heidegger is not issuing a blanket condemnation of technology. He is not a neo-Luddite seeking to
return to a more primitive way of life. As he himself write, "For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology blindly. It would be
shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances" (DT 53). What
Heidegger is concerned about is that our uncritical dependence on this way of living might one day cause us to "find ourselves so firmly shackled to these
technical devices that we fall into bondage to them" (DT 53-4). Technology is not as simple as something that one is either for or against. In fact,
Heidegger makes the argument that we can say both "yes" and "no" to technology at the same time: We can use technical devices, and yet with proper
use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them at any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them
alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature....We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside,
that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher....Having this comportment we no longer view

In confronting technology as just one understanding among

many, one is able to gain a free relation to it and utilize technical apparatus without
allowing oneself to be confined to a technological understanding of reality. But one
cannot achieve such a relation until one engages in reflective thought regarding one's
ontological situation, that is, what constitutes reality.
things only in a technical way. (DT 54)

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Alt Lets Beings Be

Recognition that technological thought denies the possibilities of "letting beings be"
provides the basis for a genuine respect for natural beings
Zimmerman 03
(Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eco-phenomenology : back to the earth itself, p. 79-80)
First, however, let us discuss briefly another aspect of Heidegger's early thought that is important for environmental philosophy, namely, his claim that
Dasein's being is care. In part, this claim emphasizes that Dasein is not a disembodied intellect, but instead radically finite, embodied, being-in-theworld for whom beings matter. Dasein cares for itself when it frees itself from inauthenticity (self-deceptive and self-disowning flight into beings), and
when it frees itself for authenticity (affirmation that one is the mortal, temporal, historical openness in which beings can manifest themselves).

Dasein cares for other beings when it lets them be, in the sense of allowing them to
manifest themselves in terms of their own inherent possibilities . Dasein exists not for itself alone, but
instead in the service of the self-manifesting of beings. By defining human Dasein in this way, Heidegger sought to go beyond the "humanism" that

Taking
beings into care means not only intervening ontically to preserve them, but more importantly
holding open the clearing in which they can show up as beings. The former kind of caring may be
misguided unless the latter kind takes place appropriately. In 1946, describing Dasein as the "shepherd of Being," Heidegger urged people
not to disclose beings exclusively as raw material for modern technology .17 Hence, he agreed with many others who,
during the past two centuries, have asserted that there are aspects of natural phenomena that cannot be revealed by
modern science and technology. Recognition of this fact, so it has been argued, may provide the basis
for a respect for natural beings, a respect lacking in the modern technological
disclosure of nature.
defines humanity as existing solely for itself. In 1941, he quoted an old Greek saying, meleta to pan, "Take into care beings in the whole."16

And we must rethink the urge to shape the world and provide quick solutions in order
to allow the world to show itself on its own terms
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Asst Prof of Philosophy @ Northeast Missouri State Univ., Heidegger and the Earth, p. 2)
Some might find this unnecessarily harsh. We academicians may wish to contest the accusation. Surely, in the universities of all places, thinking is going
on. But Heidegger had no respect for that or any other kind of complacency. The thinking he saw as essential is no more likely, perhaps unfortunately, to
be found in universities or among philosophers than anywhere else. For the thinking he saw as essential is not the simple amassing and digesting of facts

The thinking Heidegger saw

as essential, the thinking his works call us to, is not a thinking that seeks to master anything, not a
thinking that results from a drive to grasp and know and shape the world; it is a
thinking that disciplines itself to allow the world - the earth, things - to show themselves on
their own terms. Heidegger called this kind of thinking `reflection'. In 1936 he wrote, "Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own
presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question." ' Reflection is thinking
that never rests complacently in the conclusions reached yesterday; it is thinking that
continues to think, that never stops with a satisfied smile and announces: We can
cease; we have the right answer now. On the contrary, it is thinking that loves its own life, its own
occurring, that does not quickly put a stop to itself, as thinking intent on a quick solution
always tries to do.
or even the mastering of complex relationships or the producing of ever more powerful and inclusive theories.

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Rethinking Solves Tech Thought

Critical interrogation of technological thought opens space for new ways of thinking
that permit us to reposition our relation to technology and the physical world
Housman and Flynn 2011
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]
His final lecture, The Turn, gathers all of his thought from the three previous lectures and provides insight into exactly what Heidegger believes can be

Heidegger begins his fourth

lecture by stressing that we are not powerless against technology and that positionality changes. In
order for positionality to changein order for us to regain our role as shepherds of Being,
guarding the thing as thingthe human must find its way back into the breadth of its
essential space (1951, 4-3). What does this mean, though; where and what is this essential space? According to Heidegger, the
humans essential space resides in its belonging to being, and the essence of being is thinking, or thought-worthiness. It is
here where I believe the Bremen lectures reaches its climax, for after arriving at the essence of the human, he then asks,
What are we to do? His response: [W]e first and only consider this: How must we think, for thinking is
the authentic action [Handeln], where action means: to give a hand [an die Hand gehen] to the essence of being in order to prepare for it that
site in which it brings itself and its essence to speech. (1951, 4-4) 33 Thinking is what must be done, for thinking
allows us to dwell near things, reminds us that we must guard the thing as thing, and allows for us to let
being be. Such thinking means we relate to the world in a new way, no longer as slaves to
technology through positionality, dependent on it for our application and consumption, but rather incorporating the
authentic action of thinking into the technological world. The turn that Heidegger refers to, then, represents a turn to
thinking and a turning about of positionality, or in other words, a shift in how we dwell in such a
positioned world.
done to address the danger. While his tone earlier may have been perceived as pessimistic or despairing,

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A/T Perm
The perm is severance:
Moving target- they arent confined to the representations of the 1AC- justifies spiking
out of all links and makes debate unpredictable- we dont learn about the plan in
relation to the K when they can just kick it whenever they want to
Voter for fairness and education
And each of our links is a disad to the perm <EXPLAIN>
The permutation corrupts our alternativeworking within existing institutions merely
reinforces the destructive urges of the control-obsessed subject and undermine the
achievement of a new understanding
Zimmerman 94
(Michael, Professor + Chair of Philosophy @ Tulane, Contesting Earths Future, p. 108)

Because modern humanity's openness for being has become so constricted that things can only show
themselves one-dimensionally as flexible raw material, modern humanity has become oblivious to its
highest possibility, namely, to let things be by holding open the clearing in which they can reveal
themselves. Like a deep ecologist, Heidegger argued that reforming existing institutions would only
reinforce the destructive urges of the control-obsessed subject . Claiming that anthropocentric humanism
underestimates humanity, he favored a "higher humanism" that lets things be, instead of disclosing them as instruments serving the power-interests of
the human subject.z8 Like many deep ecologists, he said that the

ethics needed to improve our treatment of

nature cannot arise from the metaphysical framework of humanism, but only from a new ethos, a
new way of understanding what humans and nonhumans are. In this sense, ontology proceeds ethics.
And Politics is an illusion the essence of the perm is not political
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf

The essence of politics is itself nothing political , as Heidegger might rightly say. For this very reason, when
Heidegger focuses on the essence of politics, he turns away from politics itselfthe realm of actual
parties, policies, lawmaking, political debate and political power. In Heideggers view, this is no
loss, because such phenomena are nothing but shadows on the wall of the cave . But this
attitude prevents him from thinking about crucial practical questions. For instance, what is the proper relation of a peoplehis own peopleto its
minorities and its neighbors? (The essay Wege zur Aussprache in GA 13 is an unusual attempt to take some steps in this direction.)

And Philosophy cannot focus on the political

Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf]

As the event of the grounding of the there, or the founding of the site of the moment (323), be-ing
necessarily has a political dimension, and the Contributions are a political text, in a broad sense. Heidegger apparently hopes
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to create the philosophy of the German peopleand make the Germans the people of his philosophy (43). But despite a certain craving for
a moment of revolutionary urgency, the text is far from a manifesto; it is hesitant, vague, and
focused on the essence of the people rather than on any concrete policies . Heidegger has come to
realize that there is a gap between politics and philosophy. Because philosophy opens up
experience rather than directing and constraining it, philosophy can never immediately
ground history (37).
And the permutation still links to the K- An embracement of the technological mindset
is mutually exclusive from examination of ontology
Thiele 95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.193-4, JRC)]

Technology is one of Heidegger's enduring and foremost concerns. Though Heidegger only explicitly
formalized this concern in his later work, he expressed his worry about the systematic rationalization of the world early on. In 1919, Heidegger clearly
described in a personal letter what over two decades later would become a preoccupation of his published work. He writes: " The

unbridled,
to nail life and everything living onto a board , like things, orderly and
flat, so that everything becomes overseeable, controllable, definable, connectable, and explicable, where only many pure
and unrestrained (sit venia verbo)`ables' existthis directive underlies all the many quasi-memories of
life, which are being attempted today in every sphere of experience." ' For Heidegger, the
"Enlightenment directive" to control and standardize life ensues from the metaphysical
drive to objectify the world. Modern technology and metaphysics, it follows, are largely equivalent terms (EP 93). Both arise from
and evidence a refusal to think Being in their systematic (conceptual and practical) effort to possess and master being. Modern technology
and metaphysics stand entwined. As such, neither allows a proper perspective from
which to evaluate or overcome the other (OGS 59). Technology entices us into a productive
process that precludes questioning thought, yet only such questioning could adequately
reveal the nature of metaphysics. In turn, metaphysical humankind, engaged as a subject in the reductive objectification of
basically Enlightenment directive

being, is left little alternative but a technological apprehension and manipulation of the world.

And that Kills Alt Solvency - Technological thought shuts out all other modes of
thinking
McWhorter 92
[Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, Heidegger and the Earth, ed. by Ladelle McWhorter)JRC]
This managerial, technological

mode of revealing, Heidegger says, is embedded in and constitutive of Western culture and has
been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other modes of
revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will take tremendous effort to think through
this danger, to think past it and beyond, tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the
inevitability, along with revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their
passage as events not ultimately under human control. And of course even the call to
allow this thinking - couched as it so often must be in a grammatical imperative
appealing to an agent - is itself a paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to
speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in new directions, directions of
which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we may never dream. And shattered we may
be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves - selves engineered by the technologies of power that shaped, that are, modernity - are at

Any thinking that threatens the notion of human being as modernity has posited it
as rationally self-interested individual, as self-possessed bearer of rights and
obligations, as active mental and moral agent - is thinking that threatens our very
being, the configurations of subjective existence in our age.
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And Meditative thought cannot be accessed by the perm, the is a way of living that lets
things be. Taking action is incompatible with meditative thinking because it directs
meditative thinking to a desired end, technologizing the very process that is supposed
to provide the escape
Brown and Toadvine 03
[Charles S. professor in dept of philosophy @ University of Oregon, and Ted assoc professor in dept of philosophy @ University of Oregon , Ecophenomenology : Back to the Earth Itself, Excerpted from a book, MUSE]

"Calculative thinking- is actually thoughtless and oblivious of Beingwhich withdraws,

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

is in worlds and language that things first come into being

and are. For this reason the misuse of language ... destroys our authentic relation to
things."23

And thought fails when done from within the existing frame of technological referencewe must step back and not act for contemplation to be successful.
Ijselling 88
[Samuel, Professor of Philosophy and Bumblebees, Catholic University of Louvain, 1988, The End of Philosophy as the Commencement of Thinking:
Critical Heidegger, p. 196-7]

To metaphysical thinking, Heidegger counterposes another kind of thinking which he calls

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

Heidegger is himself
fully aware of the seriousness of this problem. He will contend that this other thinking can only
be prepared, that it is essentially, and indeed remains, untimely and can always only be a task.
It requires quite specific strategies to guard it and to protect it against the danger which
threatens it to an ever-increasing degree from the side of the sciences and their cybernetic
concepts of computer science, is another kind of thinking then still possible? One should not underestimate this difficulty and

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organization within a self-regulating world civilization. Heidegger knows that this other thinking
can never be a purely university or academic affair because these organizations , with their indigenous research
operations, their conferences and their literary directives are carried along by the metaphysico-technical thinking and
themselves belong to world civilization. Still less can it subsist outside of a particular historical, technico-economic, politicoscientific, institutional and linguistic frame of reference. For this reason, the greatest possible care has to be taken to
prevent it from being the victim of the attempt to interpret it and to integrate it within
the existing frame of reference. Much of Heidegger's rhetoric must be viewed in this light.

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A/T Paralysis
The solves better than quick-fix solutions, which solves paralysis better
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]
Heidegger never had a simplistic understanding of power in terms of activity and passivity. For example, Daseins

use and understanding

of ready-to-hand equipment is a letting-be-involved (SZ 8485); this letting is not inaction, of
course, but neither is it the imposition of human plans and efforts on a valueless material
world; in our activities, each of us encounters the teleology of everyday things as a given. On the Essence of
Truth extends this notion into a general letting-be (Sein-lassen). To let be is not to detach oneself, but to engage
oneself with the open region and its openness (Heidegger 1998, 144). In the late 1930s, Heidegger still insists that
letting-be requires the highest form of insistence or steadfastness (Instndigkeit: GA 66, 103). Letting-be is not
passive: it activates us, as it were, by allowing us to encounter beingsby connecting us
to what is.

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A/T Must Act

Ontology prefigures fundamental meaning their argument makes no sense without
an accurate ontology the K is a prerequisite. Policies that can solve can appear after
you vote negative.
Dillon 99
[Michael, Prof. of Politics @ University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces, p. 97-98]
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the
deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political 4-never tired of pointing out, the

relevance of ontology to all

other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say anything
about anything that is, without always already having made assumptions about the is as such.
Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered within it. What this
ontological turn does to other regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they
operate. The implications of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought,
demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue,
the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered
problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the exception, it
seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its
industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With

its foundations at issue, the very

authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of
freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and
what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger,
and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and
inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words,
whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you
still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe
the problem of action for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane
question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking,
but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It
is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments
of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock
innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.
And Letting be is the opposite of a retreat from action. It lets action occur.
Thiele 95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, p.83)]

Openness and releasement

do not preclude, but rather invite, activity and thought. In turn, letting-be is not tantamount to
a retreat from the world. Quite the opposite: it entails the formation of worldly
relationships made all the more dynamic because they are no longer constrained by the
habits of possessive mastery. Heidegger writes: "The freedom to reveal something overt lets
whatever 'is' at the moment be what it is. Freedom reveals itself as the 'letting-be' of
what-is.... The phrase we are now using, namely the 'letting-be' of what-is, does not,
however, refer to indifference and neglect, but to the very opposite of them. To let
something be is in fact to have something to do with it.... To let what-is be what it is
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means participating in something overt and its overtness in which everything that 'is'
takes up its position."

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A/T No Action
Our framework is a form of political dissent that effects changes in political practice
Bleiker 2000
[Ph.D. from the Australian National University, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland (Roland, 2000 First Published,
2004 Edition, Cambridge University Press, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p. 210-1]
While providing compelling evidence of subtle forms of domination, a discursive approach may run the risk of leaving us with an image of the world in
which the capacity for human agency is all but erased, annihilated by impenetrable discursive forces. This risk is particularly acute in a world that is
characterised by increasingly heterogeneous and perhaps even elusive cross-territorial dynamics. But recognising these transversal complexities does not
necessarily lead into a pessimistic cul de sac. Discourses, even if they take on global dimensions, are not as overarching as some analysts suggest. They
contain fissures and cracks, weak points which open up chances to turn discursive dynamics against themselves. The previous chapter has outlined this
position in detail. A brief rehearsal even at the risk of appearing slightly repetitive is necessary to provide the prerequisite for an adequate discursive
conceptualisation of human agency in global politics. For this purpose we must, as the prologue has already stressed, seek to see beyond the levels of
analysis problematique that has come to frame international relations theory. Rather

than limiting the study of global

politics to specific spheres of inquiry those related to the role of states and the restraints imposed on them by the
structures of the international system an analysis of transversal struggles pays attention to various
political terrains and the crossterritorial dynamics through which they are intertwined with each
other. One of these terrains is the sphere of dailiness, which is all too often eclipsed by investigations that
limit the domain of global politics to more visible sites of transversal struggle, such as wars,
diplomatic negotiations, financial flows or trade-patterns. The domain of dailiness, though, is at
least as crucial to the conduct of global politics , and an investigation into discursive dynamics illustrates why this the
case.
Cracks and weaknesses in globalised discursive practices can be seen best by shifting foci from epistemological to ontological issues. This is to say that

in addition to analysing how discourses mould and control our thinking process, we must
scrutinise how individuals, at the level of Being, may or may not be able to escape
aspects of the prevalent discursive order. Being is always a product of discourse. But Being
also is becoming. It contains future potential, it is always already that which it is not. Being
also has multiple dimensions. Hyphenated identities permit a person to shift viewpoints constantly, to
move back and forth between various ways of constituting oneself. Resulting methods of mental
deplacement, of situating knowledge, open up possibilities for thinking beyond the
narrow confines of the transversally established discursive order . This thinking space
provides the opportunity to redraw the boundaries of identity which control the
parameters of actions available to an individual. Exploring this thinking space already is
action, Heidegger claims, for thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action, he continues, is the simplest and at
the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man.3 But how is one to understand processes through
which critical thinking breaks through the fog of discourse and gives rise to specific and identifiable expressions of human agency?

The concept of tactic offers the opportunity to take a decisive step towards exploring
the practical dimensions of Dasein, the existential awareness of Being, without losing the abstract insight provided by
Heidegger. The sphere of dailiness is where such practical theorising is most effective. Entering
this ubiquitous sphere compels us to one more shift, away from contemplating the becoming of
Being towards investigating specific ways in which individuals employ their mobile subjectivities to
escape discursive forms of domination. The focus now rests on everyday forms of resistance,
seemingly mundane daily practices by which people constantly shape and reshape their
environment. One can find such forms of resistance in acts like writing, laughing,
gossiping, singing, dwelling, shopping or cooking. It is in these spheres that societal values are
gradually transformed, preparing the ground for more open manifestations of dissent.

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A/T Calculative Thought Inevitable

Calculative thought is not inevitablewhen viewing things though the lens ot the
alternative we can find other ways of thinking
Carnevale 05
(Franco, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 5, Edition 1 April 2005, The Palliation of Dying: A Heideggerian Analysis of the
Technologization of Death pg. 5)

Heideggers analysis of technology outlines two distinctive forms of thought: calculative and
contemplative (Buckley, 1992). Calculative thought is centered on measurement and is
oriented toward manipulation and control, striving to attain certainty and security . In
contrast, contemplative thought seeks to question the meaning of things, particularly, the
meaningful thinking of Being. Buckley (1992) highlights how representational thinking is central to Heideggers explication of the
above distinction. Essential to traditional philosophy and modern science, Representational thought treats the world or reality itself as if it were a picture
... wherein so much energy has been spent on how the subject gets a correct picture of the world, how this picture is given, how the picture is focused
(Buckley, 1992, p. 236). This

distinction between calculative and contemplative thought is

qualitative rather than quantitative. That is, the former should not be regarded as a
lesser version of the latter. They are essentially incommensurate.
And even if they win that calculative thought is inevitable, the exclusive technological
thought of the Affirmative limits out all other ways of thinking from the plan. The
alternative is to step away from this exclusiveness and embrace meditative thought to
filter out bad forms of thought.
Carnevale 05
(Franco, Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 5, Edition 1 April 2005, The Palliation of Dying: A Heideggerian Analysis of the
Technologization of Death pgs. 5-6)
Buckley also points out that

Heidegger does not view calculative thought - central to modern science as negative. The problem occurs when calculative thought becomes exclusive (Buckley, 1992,
p. 238). This risks the potential for science to become a mere technique without true
understanding an activity in passivity. Heideggers challenge seeks to demonstrate
that calculation is but one form of thought, while arguing for a leap toward
contemplative thought. Heideggers (1962/1977) Question Concerning Technology provides an
illustration of such contemplative thought. Parallel to his analysis of the prevalent modern understanding of technology
(outlined above), he traces the signification of cause to Greek antiquity. Here he reveals that although cause is related to that which brings about effects,
it is also that to which something else is indebted - that which is responsible for the effect (Heidegger, 1962/1977, p. 7). This responsible way of being
correspondingly brings things to presence. Every

occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into

presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing forth ... It is of utmost
importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft
manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of

For what presences by means of physis has the

bursting open belonging to bringing-forth ... Bringing-forth brings hither out of
concealment forth into unconcealment ... within what we call revealing (Heidegger, 1962/1977, p.
10-11).vi This revealing was referred to by the Greeks as aletheia. In other words, the instrumentality of
technology is responsible for poetically bringing forth a revealing unconcealment.
Whereas technique in the modern sense refers to an essence-less skill, techne in the ancient Greek
sense is linked to episteme - knowing in the widest sense - belonging to bringing-forth, to poiesis (Heidegger, 1962/1977, p. 13). Knowing, in
the techne sense, reveals and opens up.
something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiesis ...

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A/T Life Needed For V2L

Death is the ground of freedom in lifeour decisions have no meaning if they are not
framed by finitude. Treating death as a mere event to be avoided reduces our ability to
freedom to mere calculation.
Dillon 96
[Michael, professor Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster, The Politics of Security, pp. 82-84]

Whereas tragic denial is willful blindness to this conflict, to go through life with ones eyes open
means to see tragic denial shape the entire morphological scope of the law .14 To go through life
with ones eyes open requires a commitment, The topos of encounter 83 also, however, to explore the
tragic topos of the encounter that human being has in its own being of obligatory freedom
with the uncanniness of Being as such, and the demitted call of Justice which resounds throughout it. Such is the
special place of the political that political thought has to think: it is more salutary for
thinking to wander in estrangement than to establish itself in the comprehensible .15 It is a
matter for it, then, of remaining faithful to phenomena as they constantly and continuously display this occulting phenomenalising manifested through a
temporal being freed by birth into no escape from death, continuously challenged to accord Justice to that condition in the living of it, distinguished by
always already knowing beforehand the not-mere in the there of its very own there-being. It

is precisely here also that the uncanny

question of Otherness arises, because: From the singularity of being follows the singularity of Not
belonging to it, and consequently the singularity of the other. The one and the other are binding.16 Yes and No, in
short, are equi-primordial, co-originary. Yes, there is manifestation and, No, there iswhat? Something absolutely crucial arises now
because the No here is no simple no, no mere symmetrical dialectical negation of theNo, there is no manifestationcapable of realising some final
synthesis. Rather, it is the No ofNo there is no manifestation of manifestation in which the superfluity of the very absence of manifestation, its
retraction or withdrawal as Heidegger calls it, is what makes way for beings to have their very possibility to be at all. Withdrawal it has to be, then, if the
overdose of manifesting is to be liminal rather than terminal. For if we were always already in receipt of the full dose, let alone overdosed, what would
there be left for us to have and to be, to do and to see? If

our standing was already commanded or guaranteedrather

than given to be assumedwhy should we have to stand at all? Underway through times making way
the taking place of Beinghuman being has to find its own way of way-making consonant
with the uncanny challenge to be of its specific and concrete, historical passage in
truth. Born to die we always already pre-hend this No in every Yesthis Not-being in anything and
everythingby virtue of our very own mortal existing. For we die. Just as visibility never
becomes visible, manifestation never becomes manifest. And yet we are manifest
because we dwell in manifestation. There has, therefore, to be visibility for things to
appear, manifesting for things to stand-out, which is not itself a thing. This is what
Heidegger means when he says that Being is Nothing. This is what he means when he talks of the withdrawal or
the retraction of Being. There has similarly to be Being for beings to be, but Being is never manifested as such, for that would be the final trip. Co-

the No and the Yes of the Being of being which we experience in and as our
existenceour own standing-out in Being, in which the hiddenness of Being takes
place, stands-out, in its hiddenness through its questioning by us are not, however,
co-equal. Equiprimordial but without equipoise, there is a radical asymmetry in which the No outweighs
the Yes. For, remember, the Noor to be precise, the Notis no simple negation. Recall how Heidegger
insists upon it as superfluity, as the possible that always already stands higher than the actual, as that
the essence of which is to come; which, like death is for us, dis-locates, dispossesses,
individualises and singularises. For born free there is no way out, either, of our
mortality and no one can suffer anyone elses death. Only I can die my death. Knowing
that singularises me, removes me from the world and deprives me of any certain
meaning other than that of the opaque mystery of not being. And whereas this has often
been taken to be either a mystical and mystifying anthropology or, worse still, another
account of atomistic individuality, it is of course neither. For this singular being
singularised by its birthing-towards-death (its mortal natality and natal mortality) is nonetheless also, it
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has to be recalled, a being-in-the-world and a being-with-others in unassimilable
Otherness. However much the paths of Heideggers thought may wind through singularisation, world, the other, the four-fold and the very
uncanniness which being there at all brings to light, there is no remit for forgetting that it is this composite uncanny phenomenolisingin which human
beings share an integral and, as far as we know distinctively responsible, sharewhich is at issue.

And the rise of the technology of modernity results in an alienating relationship to the
world this destroys lifes meaning for all
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992, )

The only way to have a meaningful life in the present age , then, is to let your involvement
become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is not
something that is in any way provisional -- although it certainly is vulnerable . That is why,
once a society like ours becomes rational and reflective, such total commitments begin
to look like a kind of dangerous dependency. The committed individual is identified as a workaholic or a woman who
loves too much. This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing.
But as

our culture comes more and more to celebrate critical detachment, selfsufficiency, and rational choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments . So,
commitment itself beings to look like craziness.
Thus Heidegger

comes to see the recent undermining of commitment as due not so much to a failure on
the part of the individual, as to a lack of anything in the modern world that could solicit
commitment from us and sustain us in it. The things that once evoked commitment --gods, heroes, the
God-man, the acts of great statesmen, the words of great thinkers -- have lost their authority. As a result, individuals feel
isolated and alienated. They feel that their lives have no meaning because the public
world contains no guidelines.

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A/T No Alternatives to Tech Thought

Uncritical acceptance of new modes of technology silence new modes of thought
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Asst Prof of Philosophy @ Northeast Missouri State Univ., Heidegger and the Earth, p. 1)
Heidegger often refers in his writings to the dramatic changes to which he was witness - the loss of rootedness to place that came with the invention of
the automobile, then the airplane, and now our various vehicles for travel in interplanetary space; the conquering of distances that has accompanied the
development of communications technologies such as radio, television, and film, and of course, the changes in our thinking of and with the natural world
that have come as we

have become seemingly more and more independent of the earth's forces,
more and more capable of outwitting them and even of harnessing them and forcing them to conform
to our wills. These changes - but more especially human beings' unreflective
incorporation of these changes into our daily lives - struck Heidegger as strange and very dangerous. It may
well be that there is nothing really wrong with using a tractor to plow one's land or with using a computer to write one's book, but there is something
ominous, Heidegger believed, about our not giving any thought to what is happening to ourselves and to the world when we do those things, or our not
noticing or at least not caring about the disruptions these changes bring about in the fabric of things.

Heidegger calls us to give thought to - or give ourselves over to thought of - the

strangeness of our technological being within the world. His works resound with calls
for human beings to grow more thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon
where we are and what we are doing, lest human possibility and the most beautiful of
possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not understand and only
pretend we can control.

And the Affirmative's managerial approach to the world obliterates alternative modes
of thought and is doomed to fail
McWhorter 92
(Ladelle, Asst Prof of Philosophy @ Northeast Missouri State Univ., Heidegger and the Earth, p. 6)
But it is only a dream, itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self-concealing of the mystery. We can never control the mystery, the
belonging together of revealing and concealing. In

order to approach the world in a manner exclusively

technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific, we must already have given up (or lost, or been expelled
by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing that
would unfold into knowledges of other sorts. Those other approaches or paths of
thinking must already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already have concealed themselves in order
for technological or scientific revelation to occur.

The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in its
penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals . It
forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging together of
revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management . We can
never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything.

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A/T Not Real World

Only by denying the right of technological thought to dominate can we reorient our
relationship with technology and beingJapan is our historical proof
Dreyfus 93
(Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p. 307)
Heidegger, however, sees that "it would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We

there is a way we
can keep our technological devices and yet remain true to ourselves as receivers of clearings: " We
can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature " (DT 54; G 24-25). To understand how this might be
depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances" (DT 53, G 24~. Instead, Heidegger suggests that

possible, we need an illustration of Heidegger's important distinction between technology and the technological understanding of being. Again we can
turn to Japan. In

contemporary Japan traditional, nontechnological practices still exist alongside

the most advanced high-tech production and consumption. The television set and the
household gods share the same shelf - the Styrofoam cup coexists with the porcelain teacup. We
thus see that the Japanese, at least, can enjoy technology without taking over the
technological understanding of being.

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A/T We Can Control Technology/Tech Thought

Our control over technology is an illusiontechnological thought is a mode of
enframing that reveals the world, both human and natural, as objects, standing reserve
Beckman 2000
(Tad, Prof of Philosophy @ Harvey Mudd College, "Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics,"
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html)
We are to understand technology through enframing in two very important ways. First, technology

is a process, or comingto-presence, which is underway in the world and which has truly gigantic proportions. The two concepts that Heidegger used as analogies in
arriving at the word 'Ge-stell' were 'Gebirg" and 'Gemuet.' Both of these are processes of cosmic scope. The former is the gradual building, emergence,
folding, and eroding of a mountain range. The latter is the welling up and building of emotional feelings that originate in the depths of our beings, as

technology viewed as
enframing is a process that is shaping human destiny today and that has been shaping human destiny in
relation to the universe for almost as long as we conceive of our history. What we call technology and think to be a
neutral instrument standing ready for our control is actually a specific manifestation of
this whole process. {[7], p. 19} The concept of enframing suggests that human life in the context of the natural world is gathered wholly and
cosmically within the essence of technology. Just as the technology that we now see ongoing in the world shows the
characteristic of challenging-forth the objects around us, the whole process within which human life is
developing challenges-us-forth to this mode of revealing the real or of ordering nature into standing
reserve. Our control over technology is an illusion; it and we alike are being shaped , like an
evolving mountain range, in the process that Heidegger called enframing. The possession of what we commonly call technology is
differentiated from the simple emotions that arise quickly and spontaneously in normal contexts. Second,

only a fragmentary, though characteristic, aspect of that whole development; language thought, religion, art, and all other aspects of human life are
coordinated into this development as a part of enframing.
To see the essence of technology in this way delivers us into the final phase of Heidegger's analysis, the great danger to humanity that technology
represents. Just

as enframing organizes our lives progressively into a disposition of challenging and

ordering the things around us into standing reserve, its progress as a development of
human destiny challenges and orders us into standing reserve for its own ends.
"The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme
danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As

soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man

even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst
of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the
very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to
be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the
posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything
man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It
seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself." {[7], pp. 26-7; emphasis added}
Just as humans have progressively limited the being of the natural objects around them, Heidegger observed, they too have acquired a progressively
limited character or being. While we have come to think that we encounter only ourselves in the world, "in truth, however, precisely nowhere does man

the epoch of
modern technology possesses the gravest danger because it is the epoch whose
characteristic is to conduct humanity out of its own essence. Modern technology , in
Heidegger's view, is the highest stage of misrepresentation of the essence of being human . (9) In
today any longer encounter himself, i.e., in his essence." {[7], p. 27} While all epochs of human evolution contain danger,

order to understand this danger completely and, certainly, in order to come to accept it as a correct analysis, will require a more extensive review of
Heidegger's theory of human nature and its essence. But this will be easier and also more appropriate in the final section of this essay, after we have
reviewed Heidegger's understanding of art. For art, in its essence and not as we presently conceive of it, from the disposition of enframing, is a wholly
separate path of human development.

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A/T Technology Good

Technological thinking drives technology into darkness- only the alternative creates the
capacity of reclaiming technology for non-aggressive ends
Wolcher 04
[Louis E., Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law, Washington Law Review, February 2004]

the essence of modern technology makes a world - an odious world, perhaps,

but a world nonetheless. In a world in thrall to technological thinking, freedom's mode of
abiding consists for the most part in its withdrawal and quiescence . A manifestation of human being-i
Like all things human,

n-theworld, technological thinking stands in the sharpest possible contrast to what we will now call freedom for responsibility. The latter is also a
manifestation of human being-in-the-world, but unlike technological thinking it maintains a certain critical distance between itself and its world. In it,
freedom awakes. Technological

thinking falls into its world wholeheartedly, becoming its

world to such a degree that it is incapable of imagining any other possibility of
existence. In a manner that will become clear later, however, freedom for responsibility always remains on the hither side of its world in the form
of freedom's possibilities and freedom's responsibility. Modern technology, in the sense of technics, has been "captured"
by technological thinking to such a degree that the latter has driven the ultimate end of
technology as such into darkness and obscurity. It is high time for freedom to rediscover that end - namely,itself - and
in so doing to transform modern technology's essence, its mode of being.

And the alternative doesnt link to your tech good disads, it only changes our
relationship towards technology
Thiele 95
[Professor of Political Science at University of Florida (Leslie Paul, Timely Meditations, pgs. 213-215)]

Recollecting our worldly habitat not only fosters resistance to en-framing, but also
provides guidance in negotiating relations with the products of technology , namely machines and
techniques. Heidegger acknowledges that we should neither reject nor do without technological artifacts
or skills as a whole. He neither advocates nor accepts a retreat to a pretechnological state of being. Nor, despite much misinterpretation by
his commentators, does he suggest that we fatalistically resign ourselves to the victory of enframing . Its victory, he emphatically states,
is not inevitable (OGS 61). "We cannot, of course, reject today's technological world as devil's work,
nor may we destroy itassuming it does not destroy itself," Heidegger maintains. "Still less may we cling to the view that
the world of technology is such that it will absolutely prevent a spring out of it " (ID 40-41). To
confuse our destined relation to Being as if it were a fate, particularly one that leads to the inevitable decline of our civilization because of technological
rule, is itself a historically determinist, and therefore metaphysical and technological, understanding. According to Heidegger, "All attempts to reckon
existing reality morphologically, psychologically, in terms of decline and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological
behavior" (QT 48)." Fatalism is no answer because fatalism reflects the same absence of thought that is evidenced in a naive complacency with
technological "progress." Heidegger's admonition to think the nature of technology, though far from a resigned musing, is not the devising of a
counteroffensive. We

are asked to respond first to the question "What shall we think?" rather
than the question "What is to be done?" But the point is not simply that we must think before we act. The needed thinking
of what we are doing and how we are being is not solely a strategic 214 CHAPTER EIGHT RECEIVING THE SKY 215 preparation for more informed and
effective behavior. Thought must first save us from our typical modes of behaving, namely those oriented to possessive mastery. Heidegger warns that

"so long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to
master it" (QT 32). The more we fail to experience the essence of technology as enframing,
persevering in the mistaken notion that complex machinery is the danger, the more we
will believe that salvation lies in our mastering technology before it masters us. With this in mind,
Heidegger explicitly states that he is "not against technology," nor does he suggest any "resistance against, or condemnation
of, technology" (MHC 43-44). Indeed, the development of complex machines and techniquestechnology as it is commonly understood has enormous
benefits that must not be depreciated. It would be shortsighted to condemn such technology out of hand. Apart from our obvious dependence on
technical devices, their development also often "challenges us to ever greater advances" (DT 53). From political, social, cultural, and environmental
standpoints, technology

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population, technological developments that buffer the earth from our predaceousness seem both urgent and indispensable. A good bit of the destruction

Having machines efficiently

serve our needs is neither evil nor regrettable. But this service must be grounded on
our discovery of what needs we truly have. More importantly, it must be grounded on our discovery of what transcends
human need." These, decidedly, are not technological questions, and our capacity to answer them
largely rests on our recovery of the capacity to think beyond the criterion of
instrumental service.
humanity presently visits on the earth and itself makes sophisticated technological remedies necessary.

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A/T Alt = Genocide

Calculative thought is what allows humans to be seen as disposable in the first place,
meditative thinking allows us to understand our relations to other making the
holocaust impossible
Heidegger 66
[Excerpt from: Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and
Row, 1966: 44-46. MV]

If we are able to adopt the attitude of releasement toward things, we free ourselves to
think about the meaning of all this technological innovation that 5 surrounds us. This
meaning is hidden behind all the machines, all the calculative thinking. We are dazzled by
technological achievement and forget to think about what its significance really may be. This meaning often bursts upon us in the effects of technology
we had not expected.

E mail enables us to communicate quickly with friends all over the world. Yet we deal
with so much of it that we seldom take time to sit in a quiet place and write slowly and carefully to a
friend or loved one. Writing long hand suited such slow and careful expression of thought. Modern medical
technology makes it possible for people to live longer. What should we do with those additional years? Should people retire at 70 rather than at 65 years
of age? Releasement

toward things makes it possible for us to be open to the mystery of

this hidden meaning.
There is then in all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what man does and leaves undone. We do not
know the significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The
meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact
that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand
at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in
approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the
comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.

Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us
the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new
ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology
without being imperiled by it. But for the time being, we do not know for how long, man finds himself in a perilous situation. Why?
Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete
annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age a far
greater danger threatens, precisely when the danger of a third world war has been
removed. A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate. In
what sense is the statement just made valid? This assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide
of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate , bewitch, dazzle, and
beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as
the only way of thinking. What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity
in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then man would have
denied and thrown away his own special naturethat he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue
is the saving of man's essential nature. Therefore, the issue is keeping meditative
thinking alive. Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never
happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through
persistent, courageous thinking.

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And the aff frames the world is the same way the Nazis viewed the Jews before they
were exterminated.
Housman and Flynn 2011
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]
This notion (i.e. the distancelessness of our world and failure to consider the thing as thing) sets the stage for Heideggers next lecture, Positionality.
Now that Heidegger has established this distancelessness in relation to the thing, he proceeds to expand the scope of this thought beyond one particular
thing (e.g. the jug in his lecture The Thing) but instead in relation to everythingin our entire way of relating to the world. He says, [This distanceless]
stands insofar as everything that presences is standing reserveThe standing reserve persists. It persists insofar as it is imposed upon for a
requisitioning. Directed into requisitioning, it is placed into application (1951, 2-3; my italics). This

notion of relating to the

world as standing reserve is at the core of Heideggers thought. It refers to a way of perceiving the world

that does not consider the thing as thing; instead, it considers the thing for our application and thereby encourages us to requisition, order, call upon,
and marshal our surroundings for the benefit of our use. This notion of application is exemplified not only in the use of a particular technological device
(e.g. using a computer for a specific, results-oriented purpose), but more broadly speaking in how we approach the world. We approach the world in
terms of how things can be applied, largely for the sake of generating desired results. We

then order the 29 world, as standing

reserve, in such a way that those results can be realized and achieved, while all along forgetting about the thing as thing and failing to concernfully
approach that which presences.

things are now standing as standingreserve to be marshaled and positioned. He says, Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in essence the
same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the
same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of
hydrogen bombs (1951, 2-6). Regarding the Rhine River, he says, The hydroelectric plant is placed in the river. It imposes upon it for
Heidegger speaks of the agricultural industry and the Rhine River to underscore how

water pressure, which sets the turbines turning, the turning of which drives the machines, the gearing of which imposes upon the electrical current
through which the long distance power centers and their electrical grid are positioned for the conducting of electricity (1951, 2-6). While equating the
motorized food industry to the production of corpses in gas chambers may be interpreted as a distasteful and offensive comparison, Heideggers
intentional bluntness and lack of reservation emphasizes the gravity and ubiquity of this positioning. No longer do we relate to the Rhine as thingas the
beautiful River that we are connected to, that we dwell around, as part of Being. On the contrary, it is approached for the sake of its consequences, for the
sake of producing electricity, which in turn powers our televisions, which in turn defines how we plan our days, etc. etc. Indeed, Heidegger defines this
self-gathered collection of positioning (1951, 2-11) as positionality [das Ge-Stell], and, according to Heidegger, it is in this positionality wherein the
essence of technology lies.
So why does it matter that we now live in a positioned world exemplified by our new relationship to the Rhine as standing reserve? Positionality removes
us from our natural environmentthe environment that provides the materials that we then convert into energy and use to power our devices. When we
turn on our computers, lights, cars, etc. rarely do we reflect on the process and resources that allow for us to operate our machines. For example, when
we turn the lights on in a room, hardly ever do we say to ourselves: I am glad we have that hydroelectric plant in the Rhine, which converted that water
energy into electricity using a turbine, which was then shot through power lines into my home, producing the effect I am now witnessing with this lit
light bulb. Positionality, as exemplified here in the power grid, causes us to take for granted our natural environment. This unappreciative attitude that
defines the technological culture we live in today does not encourage people to concernfully approach things and our worldinstead it distances us from
the very environment that is such a part of our essence as beings in this world. Herein lies the problem: because we are so immersed in this positioned
world that induces us to take nature for granted, we do not realize that turning on that light bulb actually has real consequences for our environment,
such as producing global warming. In addition, the technological, positioned world also removes us from caring for and guarding our environment, and
Heidegger proceeds in his lecture by stressing the danger of positionality.
In his next lecture, appropriately entitled The Danger, Heidegger

claims that positionality is the danger; it

refuses the world and unguards the thing as thing. This notion of guardianship has been argued by many
environmental ethicists to underscore 31 our responsibility as humans to protect our earth. In many cases the position is asserted with religious motives
(i.e., God created us as stewards and we have a responsibility to guard and preserve this earth). Regardless of the theological ties, however,

Heidegger strongly believes that man has a responsibility to guard the thing, to guard
Being. He says in his originally published 1947 Letter on Humanism, Man is rather thrown from Being itself into
the truth of Being, so that ek-sisting in this fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in the light of
Being as the beings they areMan is the shepherd of Being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is

In
the essence of positionality the thing remains unguarded as thing (1951, 3-1). Positionality
threatens our essence insofar as it steers us away from guarding the earth, from
experiencing the world with care. As alluded to earlier, in the context of global warming this means that the modern
experienced as care (1993 [1947], 234). Heidegger reiterates this notion of guardianship in his Bremen lecture three years later when he says,

technological world, described in short as our relation to things as standing reserve to be ordered and positioned, repels us from our essence, as
shepherds of Being, and helps explain why we are faced with this environmental crisis

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A/T Alt = Nihilism

If they win an impact to nihilism it proves utilitarian calculations dont come first
And the status quo focus on technology breeds nihilism
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992]
But how could we know that our distress was due to the absence of a god rather than personal and social problems? One answer might be that we will
just have to wait for the perfected welfare state and then see how we feel. If defenders of the Enlightenment are right, distress will be eliminated, whereas
Heidegger, one might suppose, would expect that, as technology succeeds, the suffering will grow. But Heidegger does not makes this claim.

Heidegger admits and fears the possibility that everyone might simply become healthy and
happy, and forget completely that they are receivers of understandings of being. All Heidegger can say
is that such a forgetting of our forgetting of being would be the darkest night of nihilism . In
such an "unworld" Heidegger could not longer expect to be understood. Only now, and only as
long as he can awaken our distress, and our sense of our receptivity to a mysterious source of
meaning that creates and sustains us, can he hope that we will be able to see the force of his
interpretation.
And nihilism arises from modernitys focus on objectivity and factual reason
Lucht 06
[Assistant Professor of Philsophy at Avleria University, PhD in philosophy from Emory (Marc, no date given but latest cited in footnotes is 2006,
Towards a Phenomenology of Intercultural Dialogue,]
Heidegger argues that nihilism

arises largely from two metaphysical commitments orienting western

thought: the sharp division between subject and object , and the distinction between fact and
value together with the reduction of what counts as real to just one the fact side of that distinction. Especially the
latter commitment, on which I shall focus in this essay, is tied closely to the authority of the natural sciences: the
more scientific and technical modes of thinking are taken to be the sole legitimate
modes of access to truths about being, the less it is that anything not subject either to
quantitative representation or technological subjection to practical ends will be regarded as anything
more than the correlate of mere subjective interpretation or preference . Indeed, Nietzsche shares Heideggers view of
the link between nihilism and the authority of mathematical-technical modes of rationality:

A scientific interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most
stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning [] But an
essentially mechanical world [which] would be an essentially meaningless world. Assuming that one
estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a
scientific estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is music in it!

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***FRAMEWORK BLOCKS***

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2NC Anti-Generic Anti K Framework

Dont vote us down for running kritiks
1) Neg flex- kritks are key to test all parts of the aff and aff bias.
2) Critical thinking- it helps us think about the interactions of discourse and policy
which is better for education and clash.
3) Reciprocity- they can critique us
4) Fairness- the aff has hyped up, overexaggerated impacts which are obtained through
faulty thinking, it doesnt unlimit the topic as we help make sure we question the
ideology of their aff.
5) Ground- reciprocity is checked because they can critique our DAs
6) Education- the affirmative excludes philosophy discussion in debate- questioning
how we created the plan is a prerequisite to deciding whether or not to enact the plan
and it forces the affirmative to defend their ontology
7) Heidegger is a core part of the topic when we are discussing technology- they should
be ready to debate a K that has specific links grounded in literature- their
interpretation is arbitrary- theres no clear definition of what is policy and what is notallows them to set up a framework to exclude all negative arguments
8) Hard debate is good debate- the Kritik forces the affirmative to justify the entirety of
the plan- this increases strategic thinking in answering critical argument- they just
have to win that there is no impact to bad ontology
And, plan focus still happens through the link arguments and kritiks can only go deeper
than policy arguments since not only do we learn about the direct implications of a
plan, but the assumptions and discourse around plans.
And their ground argument doesnt link to the Heidegger K. Its the same thing as a
disad and counterplan combination. A Disad is usually external links into something,
which is the internal link into an impact. For example, a spending disad will link a plan
into economic collapse and impacts economic collapse. The Heidegger kritk links the
plan into tech thought and impacts tech thought. The alternative acts like a counterplan
text, and the impact to the k is the net benefit.
And their topic education argument is still achieved through kritks. Cross-apply our
arguments about plan focus that say Ks can only go deeper on a subject. Also, topic
education is inevitable. Theyll have more rounds than this to learn about the topic,
unless they can isolate this round and this round alone to be key to and entire year of
topic education, then their topic education argument should fall.
And Critical theory is a prerequisite to politics
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Brown 05

2012-2013

(Wendy got her phd in Princeton in 1983 for political philosophy. Edgework:
Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists,
Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political
subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8079.html)
On the one hand, critical

theory cannot let itself be bound by political exigency; indeed, it has something of
While there are always decisive choices to be made in the political
realm (whom to vote for, what policies to support or oppose, what action to take or defer), these very delimitations of
choice are often themselves the material of critical theory. Here we might remind
ourselves that prising apart immediate political constraints from intellectual ones is
one path to being "governed a little less" in Foucault's sense. Yet allowing thinking its wildness beyond the immediate in
an obligation to refuse such exigency.

order to reset the possibilities of the immediate is also how this degoverning rearticulates critical theory and politics after disarticulating them;

critical theory comes back to politics offering a different sense of the times and a
different sense of time. It is also important to remember that the "immediate choices"
are just that and often last no longer than a political season (exemplified by the fact that the political
conundrums with which this essay opened will be dated if not forgotten by the time this book is published). Nor is the argument
convincing that critical theory threatens the possibility of holding back the political
dark. It is difficult to name a single instance in which critical theory has killed off a
progressive political project. Critical theory is not what makes progressive political
projects fail; at worst it might give them bad conscience, at best it renews their
imaginative reach and vigor.
And we shouldnt view the round from a policymaker perspective it makes solving
anything impossible
Graeber 04
[David Graeber, professor in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004]
Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that
emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isnt much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort
of thing is generally classified as policy issues, and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these. against policy (a tiny manifesto):

The notion of policy presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will
on others. Policy is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something
concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their
affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can
achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people
managing their own affairs.

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Criticism Prerequisite
Critical theory is a prerequisite to politics
Brown 05
(Wendy got her phd in Princeton in 1983 for political philosophy. Edgework:
Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists,
Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political
subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8079.html)
On the one hand, critical

theory cannot let itself be bound by political exigency; indeed, it has something of
While there are always decisive choices to be made in the political
realm (whom to vote for, what policies to support or oppose, what action to take or defer), these very delimitations of
choice are often themselves the material of critical theory. Here we might remind
ourselves that prising apart immediate political constraints from intellectual ones is
one path to being "governed a little less" in Foucault's sense. Yet allowing thinking its wildness beyond the immediate in
an obligation to refuse such exigency.

order to reset the possibilities of the immediate is also how this degoverning rearticulates critical theory and politics after disarticulating them;

critical theory comes back to politics offering a different sense of the times and a
different sense of time. It is also important to remember that the "immediate choices"
are just that and often last no longer than a political season (exemplified by the fact that the political
conundrums with which this essay opened will be dated if not forgotten by the time this book is published). Nor is the argument
convincing that critical theory threatens the possibility of holding back the political
dark. It is difficult to name a single instance in which critical theory has killed off a
progressive political project. Critical theory is not what makes progressive political
projects fail; at worst it might give them bad conscience, at best it renews their
imaginative reach and vigor.
And Ontology itself shapes our responses to ethics and politicsits interrogation
demands prioritization
Dillon 99
(Michael, Prof of Politics @ University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, p. 98)
In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or

ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one
way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of
philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking,
but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is
instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of
the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves
who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.
acknowledge it, the

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Ontological Thinking Key

We cannot base our policy choices off of statistical analysis alone, we must include the
ontological questions about being before we can come to a conclusion about reality.
Olivier 07
[Bert, Professor of Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Nature as abject, critical psychology, and revolt: The pertinence of
Kristeva, South African Journal of Psychology, 37(3), 2007, pp. 443469]
In the light of this, any

responsible human being who has taken note of the current state of
affairs cannot and should not avoid making use of every possible medium to create and
expand an informed awareness of the situation, as well as a sense of urgency and the
need to act, among as many people as possible . In my experience, mere factual knowledge is not
sufficient to have the desired effect of galvanising people into action in the present
information age, people with access to media (that is, the vast majority of people on the planet) are better informed than in any previous
era, but arguably just as apathetic as informed, judging by the deteriorating condition of natural resources.3 Rather, therefore, by placing
information about the precarious state of the earth in the context of not only a
philosophical-theoretical but also, crucially, a critical-psychological interpretation,
people are afforded the intellectual, psychological, and ethical means to appreciate
what all this information means for them and for other creatures on the planet.

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Policy Making Fails

We shouldnt view the round from a policymaker perspective it makes solving
anything impossible
Graeber 04
[David Graeber, professor in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004]
Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that
emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isnt much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort
of thing is generally classified as policy issues, and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these. against policy (a tiny manifesto):

The notion of policy presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will
on others. Policy is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something
concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their
affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can
achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people
managing their own affairs.

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Policy Making Theory

Policy only frameworks are bad for debate:
a) Education- the affirmative excludes philosophy discussion in debate- questioning
how we created the plan is a prerequisite to deciding whether or not to enact the plan
and it forces the affirmative to defend their ontology
b) Neg flexibility - limiting debate to policy discussion prohibits the negative from
running Kritiks, a main argument in debate- Ks are key to give negative teams options
when they hit affs that dont link to generic disadvantages
c) Were predictable- Heidegger is a core part of the topic when we are discussing
technology- they should be ready to debate a K that has specific links grounded in
literature- their interpretation is arbitrary- theres no clear definition of what is policy
and what is not- allows them to set up a framework to exclude all negative arguments
d) Hard debate is good debate- the Kritik forces the affirmative to justify the entirety of
the plan- this increases strategic thinking in answering critical argument- they just
have to win that there is no impact to bad ontology

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Resolved = Ontology
Our interpretation is best Resolved does not indicate action It is becoming aware of
our own Being.
Pezze 06
[Barbara, PhD Philosophy at Honk Kong U, Heidegger on Gelassenheit, Minerva, vol .10, http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol10/Heidegger.html]
Let us pause for a moment to consider a possible misunderstanding. It could appear, from what we have been saying, that Gelassenheit floats in the
realm of unreality and so in nothingness, and, lacking all power of action, is a will-less letting in of everything and, basically, the denial of the will to live!
(1966a, p. 80). But this is not the case, for in the Gelassenheit we

find something that recalls the power of

action, but which is not a will. It is a resolve [Entschlossenheit] (ibid., p. 81), but not as an act of will
that makes a decision and finds a solution to a problem or a situation. This resolve, as
Heidegger himself suggests, must be thought as the one that is spoken of in Being and Time, that is,
it is a letting oneself be called forth (1996, p. 283) to ones own most possibility of being.
Resoluteness as Entschlossenheit is translated in Being and Time is authentic being a self (1996, p. 274). It is quite
difficult to think a resolve that is not a matter of will that moves to an action; we tend,
in fact, to consider resoluteness as a strong determination to attain something . As we read in
Heideggers Introduction To Metaphysics (2000), the essence of the resolve, as he intends it, is not an intention to
act; it is not a gathering of energy to be released into action. Resolve is the beginning,
the inceptual beginning of any action moved. Here acting is not be taken as an action undertaken by Dasein in being
resolute. Rather, acting refers to the existential and fundamental mode of being of Dasein, which is to be care, and which is the primordial being of
Dasein. Resoluteness, in its essence, is the remaining open of Dasein for be-ing. In the context of the Conversation, this resolve should thus be
understood as the opening of man particularly undertaken by him for openness [als das eigens bernommene Sichffnen des Daseins fr das
Offene] (Heidegger 1966a, p. 81). It is a resolve to remain open to be-ing, and therefore to what is ownmost to mans nature, which is disclosed in
relation to be-ing. This resolve is what Heidegger, in the Conversation, indicates as releasement to that-which-regions, the resolve to release oneself to
that-which-regions, to remain open towards the openness itself. Now, there is another element that pertains to Gelassenheit: there is, in fact, not only a
resolve, but also a steadfastness [Ausdauer] (Heidegger 1966a, p.81) proper to Gelassenheit. Thinking,

becoming more and

more aware of its nature, and experiencing more clarity about it, remains firm and
resolute. Thinking stands within and rests in this composed steadfastness (ibid., p.
81]). The steadfastness proper to Gelassenheit.

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Western Enframing Kills Solvency

All attempts to think global politics presuppose an ontology which inform all following
action world order studies inherently follow a calculative and technology mindset! All
the aff claims are premised on an ontology of calculation which must be confronted
before we can enact change
Swazo 02
[professor of philosophy at university of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2002 [Norman K, Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections p.74-76]

To the extent that world order studies are steeped in a strategic rationality, in calculative
thinking, they do not concern themselves with the task of having a reflective insight
into the fundamental features of the age. They do not concern themselves with the
ground that enables any thinking and doing such as is pursued by a science, natural or
social. Yet, it is this enabling ground that is really determinative of that science, inasmuch
as all positing of a domain of inquiry presupposes an ontology. World order studies , as a
development of contemporary social science, likewise are dependent upon one or another ontological
commitment. Specifically, I shall argue, they are determined by the ontological positions that prevail in the
modern period of Western philosophy; for these are the positions fundamentally decisive for
the profound change taking place in humanity's self-understanding, in our conception
of all that is content of our world, and our relation to this world . About this I shall concern myself in
section 2. Before doing this it is important that this relation between a positive science and ontology be stated in broad outline. For this I turn to
Heidegger. "All non-philosophical sciences," remarks Heidegger, "have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in
every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences."8 Continuing, Heidegger writes: They are posited by them in advance; they are a positum for
them. All the propositions of the non-philosophical sciences, including those of mathematics, are positive propositions. Hence, to distinguish them from
philosophy, we shall call all non-philosophical sciences positive sciences. Positive sciences deal with that which is, with beings; that is to say, they always
deal with specific domains, for instance, nature. Within a given domain scientific research again cuts out particular spheres: nature as physically
material lifeless nature and nature as living nature. It divides the sphere of the living into individual fields: the plant world, the animal world. Another
domain of beings is history; its spheres are art history, political history, history of science, and history of religion. . . . The beings of these domains are
familiar to us even if at first and for the most part we are not in a position to delimit them sharply and clearly from one another. We can, of course,
always name, as a provisional description which satisfies practically rhe purpose of posi- tive science, some being that falls within the domain We can
always bring forward and picture ourselves some being belonging to any given domain. ... A beingthat's something, a table, a chair, a tree, the sky, a

World order studies are, properly speaking, nonphilosophical. While concerned with a
political domain that is central to these
inquiries, presupposing the classical architectonic claims of the science of politics for
thinking and doing.10 Insofar as the political domain is primary, world order studies deal with beings that
are said to be political, however explicitly or ambiguously this denomination is to be understood. Such beings are things of vatious kinds:
body, some words, an action.9

number of domainspolitical, economic, historical, etc.it is the

humans qua citizens, office holders, rulers, legislatots; words such as public or official documents, codes of law, tteaties of reciprocal obligation, spoken
discoutse; actions in all modes of public being-with-one-another; things mote or less familiar but not so well delimitedregimes, states, constitutions,
organizations, associations; in short, things that have theit being in thought, wotd, and deed. All

beings of the political domain

become the proper concern of this thinking qua world order studies , despite the division of this
domain into particular spheres (domestic politics and international relations) and individual fields (foreign policy, legislation, public law, public

For world order studies, politics

presents itself as global. Politics so conceived, as well as patterns of behaviot and practice between levels of
government, matter insofar as they bear upon and contribute to the overall condition of our common
planetaty existence. Indeed, properly speaking, where global identity and global interdependence are
determinative of outlook concerning political existence, the distinction of domestic and
international spheres becomes rather anachronistic, remaining useful only for
purposes of analyses and investigations proper to the science of politics in its present
empirically-oriented methodology. It is important to undetstand that political science posits in advance the
various political things that constitute its objects of investigation. In this posit, an ontology what these
things are, how they are, their way of being is implicit, if not explicit. This ontology, insofar as it is the ontology of the
specific domain or region of beings that politics is, grounds the science of politics . That is, political science can
administration, state and municipal or provincial and local government, party politics, etc.).

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be said to be dependent on, or to derive from, a regional ontology, viz., political ontology. Ontology as
such is a theoretical inquiry, i.e., inquiry "explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities," this meaning being articulated by
way of basic concepts. Political ontology, too, is a theoretical inquiry devoted to the meaning
of those entities that provide the subject matter of empirical political science qua
positive science. Consider Heidegger's following comments concerning such a relation: Scientific research accomplishes, roughly and
naively, the demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter. The basic structures of any such area have already been
worked out after a fashion in our pre-scientific ways of experiencing and interpreting that domain of
Being in which the area of subject-matter is itself confined. The 'basic concepts' which thus arise remain our proximal clues
for disclosing this area concretely for the first time. ... Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an
understanding beforehand of the subject-matter underlying all the objects a science
takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding. Only
after the area itself has been explored beforehand in a corresponding manner do these concepts become genuinely demonstrated
and 'grounded'. But since every such area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary research,
from which the basic concepts are drawn, signifies nothing else than an interpretation of those entities
with regard to their basic state of being. n It is in taking the "step back," so to speak, from the positing of a domain and the
research undertaken by a positive science to the ontology implicit in this "demarcation and initial fixing of the areas of subject-matter" that one begins to
make the move from calculative thinking to meditative thinking. Inasmuch as meditative thinking is concerned with the "meaning" that reigns in things
and thus with the ground that enables scientific inquiry, the orientation of such thinking is primarily ontological rather than positive (scientific). Here we
have the distinction between philosophy and science specifically, between philosophy qua metaphysics and science. We can now begin to make our way
through the questions initially set forth at the beginning of this chapter, and to clarifying the need for and justification of meditative thinking as it bears
upon contemporary world order thinking.

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A/T Pragmatism Good

Meditative thinking allows for pragmatism but does not reduce everything to a
calculated action solely relying on pragmatism is another link to the K
Heidegger 55
[professor and philosopher (Martin, 1955, Discourse on Thinking, part of the book Martin Heidegger: philosophical and political writings, p. 8889, )]
But even while we are thoughtless, we do not give up our capacity to think. We rather use this capacity
implicitly, though strangely: that is, in thoughtlessness we let it lie fallow. Still only that can lie fallow which in itself is a ground for growth, such as a
field. An expressway, where nothing grows, cannot be a fallow field. Just as we can grow deaf only because we hear, just as we can grow old only because
we were young; so we can grow thought-poor or even thought-less only because man at the core of his being has the capacity to think; has "spirit and
reason" and is destined to think. We can only lose or, as the phrase goes, get loose from that which we knowingly or unknowingly possess.

The growing thoughtlessness must, therefore, spring from some process that gnaws at
the very marrow of man today: man today is in flight from thinking. This flight-fromthought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today
will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. He will sayand
quite rightlythat there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in
so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course. And this display of ingenuity and
deliberation has its own great usefulness. Such thought remains indispensable. Butit also remains true that it is thinking of a special kind.

whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon

with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention
of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans
and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor
uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever
new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative
thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself.
Calculative thinking is nor meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the
meaning which reigns in everything that is.
Its peculiarity consists in the fact that

There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking.

meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is
in flight-from-thinking. Yet you may protest: mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware
above reality. It loses touch. It is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical
affairs.
This

And you may say, finally, that mere meditative thinking, persevering meditation, is "above" the reach of ordinary understanding. In this excuse only this
much is true, meditative thinking does not just happen by itself any more than does calculative thinking. At times it requires a greater effort. It demands
more practice. It is in need of even more delicate care than any other genuine craft. But it must also be able to bide its time, to await as docs the farmer,
whether the seed will come up and ripen.

Because man is a thinking,

that is, a meditating being. Thus meditative thinking need by no means be "high-flown." It
is enough if we dwell on what ties close and meditate upon what is closest; upon that
which concerns us, each one of us, here and now ; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of
Yet anyone can follow the path of meditative thinking in his own manner and within his own limits. Why?

history.

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A/T Policymaking First

Questions of ontology must be asked and answered first- they crucially inform all other
aspects of policy making
Dillon 98
(1998,Prof of Politics, University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces, p. 97-).
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the

the relevance of ontology to all

other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say anything about anything that is,
deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political 4-never tired of pointing out,

without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered
within it. What this ontological turn does to other regional modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of
that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of
philosophy. With

ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of

thought are rendered problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of

modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it called itself natural
philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the
very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of universe human
beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable
difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a
human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the

ontology you subscribe to will

construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another . You may think ontology is
some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of
thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of
being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock
innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.

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A/T Cede the Political

First, non-unique, the anti-government takeover is already underway
Gaynor 2010
(Tim, staff writer at Reuters U.S. right-wing groups, militias: study 3-4-10. http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/04/us-usa-politics-patriotsidUSTRE6234JT20100304)

The number of right-wing "Patriot" groups that see the U.S. government as their enemy
more than doubled in the last year, fanned by anger over the economy and a backlash
against the policies of President Barack Obama, according to a study published this week. The report by
the Southern Poverty Law Center said 512 anti-government Patriot groups were active in the United
States last year, a leap from 149 in 2008. The "Rage on the Right" report (www.splcenter.org) found that
militias, the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement, accounted for a large part of the increase,
rising to 127 in 2009 from 42 a year earlier. The militia and Patriot movement first came to attention in the mid-1990s in response
to what the groups saw as a tyrannical government bent on curbing individual freedoms. Most notorious was Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in
a bomb attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The study said some of the ideas of Patriot

groups raging at the

federal government in the 1990s have now become more mainstream, taken up by
groups including some "Tea Party" grassroots conservative activists who are hoping to
make a splash in November's congressional elections and beyond. "The anger seething across the
American political landscape -- over racial changes in the population, soaring public
debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama
administration that are seen as 'socialist' or even 'fascist' -- goes beyond the radical right," the report said. "The 'tea parties' and similar groups that have
sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories

Growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party, which controls

the White House and Congress, and the opposition Republican Party has been captured in
recent opinion polls. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December found 41 percent of respondents had a very or somewhat favorable
and racism." HATE GROUPS GROW

view of the Tea Party movement, compared with a 35 percent positive rating for the Democrats and 28 percent for the Republicans. The SPLC said the
number of hate groups in the United States grew by 54 percent between 2000 and 2008, "driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white
immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African American president." The SPLC
said the number of hate groups rose again slightly last year to 932 from 926 in 2008 "despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group" -- the American
National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states. The SPLC study gave several examples of what it said was "violence emanating
from the radical right" since Obama took office last year. These included the murders of six law enforcement officers by right-wing extremists and the
arrests of "racist skinheads and others" in alleged plots to assassinate Obama.

And theoretical thought is necessary for the foundation of Democracy and inseparable
from modern day political practice
Dallmayr 01
(PhD. professor in the department of philosophy and political science at the University of Notre Dame Ahcieveing Our world, Toward a Global and Plural
democracy pg 24-26, google books)
The other point of departure has to do with the issue of antifoundationalism. Faithful to pragmatist teachings, Rorty

asserts the primacy of

the practical over the theoretical and proceeds to denounce or impugn many or most of the
theoretical preoccupations of American intellectuals during the past half century . As he notes, many of these
preoccupations are of Continental European origin, and thus not properly germane or indigenous to the American experience (an argument not free of
ethnocent:ric leanings). More

important in the current context is a certain obtuseness of

pragmatism narrowly constructed. Clearly, the asserted primacy of the practical over the
theoretical is itself a theoretical pronouncement, and thus can hardly be used to
dislodge or delegitimate reective theorizing as such. Moreover, as Rorty himself recognizes,
theoretical initiatives during recent decades-even when of European origin - have greatly
helped in raising social consciousness or sensitivity in the United States, in the sense of
rendering Americans more sensitive or attentive to ethnic or cultural otherness, to the problems of
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identity formation, and hence to the complexity of self-other relations in a multicultural society. 8 As
this author believes, again, the strengthening or reinvigoration of democracy is impossible
without a heightened awareness of this complexitya point largely ignored in old-style socialism and
progressivism. Valorizing theory in this manner does not amount to an endorsement of foundationaism.' In the author's view, theory does not constitute
the premise or a priori foundation of action, a preamble from which practice could be deduced through logical entailment, nor does it furnish a mere
cloak or posthoc rationalization to practical conduct. Contrary to such construals, theorizing simply means a careful vigilance or reective mindfulness, a
certain way of minding one's business'where 'business' includes what is happening in the world and how people behave toward each other. Differently
put, theory is not the servant or handmaiden of practice (in a means-ends relation), nor its master or omnipotent dictator, but rather simply its custodian
or attentive companion.9 Viewed

against this background, theory can only with great difficulty be

separated from practice, and then only for limited heuristic purposes. This book adopts such a heuristic device, in the sense that part 1

(Globalization and Democracy) focuses more on practical-political issues involved in the tension between global and local trajectories, while part 2
('Pluralism: Variations on Self-Other Relations) shifts attention to more recessed theoretical problems having to do with the liaison between seliood
and otherness, identity and difference. One should note, however, the division is one of emphasis only and not of 'primacy in either direction; hence,
overlaps are multiple and in principle unavoidable. As readers of chapters in both parts will quickly detect, practical-political concerns constantly invade
and permeate philosophical deliberations, just as theoretical concerns impinge on discussions of globalization and the promotion of global democracy.

And political reform cannot succeed without consideration of ontology

Zizek 99
(Slavoj-, Slavoj, iek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate
School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton
University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is
currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for
Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana 10-28-1999, Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism, London Review Vol. 21 No. 21)
In dissecting Late Socialism, Havel was always aware that Western

liberal democracy was far from meeting the

ideals of authentic community and living in truth on behalf of which he and other dissidents opposed Communism. He was
faced, then, with the problem of combining a rejection of totalitarianism with the need to offer critical insight into Western democracy. His solution was
to follow Heidegger and to see in the technological hubris of capitalism, its mad dance of self-enhancing productivity, the expression of a more
fundamental transcendental-ontological principle will to power, instrumental reason equally evident in the Communist attempt to overcome

the fateful shift from

concrete socio-political analysis to philosophico-anthropological generalisation, by
means of which instrumental reason is no longer grounded in concrete capitalist
social relations, but is instead posited as their quasi-transcendental foundation . The
capitalism. This was the argument of Adornos and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first engineered

moment that Havel endorsed Heideggers recourse to quasi-anthropological or philosophical principle, Stalinism lost its specificity, its specific political

in
the long run, Russian Communism and Americanism were metaphysically one and the
same). Keane tries to save Havel from this predicament by emphasising the ambiguous nature of his intellectual debt to Heidegger. Like Heidegger,
dynamic, and turned into just another example of this principle (as exemplified by Heideggers remark, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, that,

Havel conceived of Communism as a thoroughly modern regime, an inflated caricature of modern life, with many tendencies shared by Western society
technological hubris and the crushing of human individuality attendant on it. However, in contrast to Heidegger, who excluded any active resistance to
the social-technological framework (only God can save us, as he put it in an interview, published after his death), Havel put faith in a challenge from
below in the independent life of civil society outside the frame of state power. The power of the powerless, he argued, resides in the self-organisation
of civil society that defies the instrumental reason embodied in the state and the technological apparatuses of control and domination. I find the idea of
civil society doubly problematic. First, the opposition between state and civil society works against as well as for liberty and democracy. For example, in
the United States, the Moral Majority presents itself (and is effectively organised as) the resistance of local civil society to the regulatory interventions of
the liberal state the recent exclusion of Darwinism from the school curriculum in Kansas is in this sense exemplary. So while in the specific case of Late
Socialism the idea of civil society refers to the opening up of a space of resistance to totalitarian power, there is no essential reason why it cannot
provide space for all the politico-ideological antagonisms that plagued Communism, including nationalism and opposition movements of an antidemocratic nature. These are authentic expressions of civil society civil society designates the terrain of open struggle, the terrain in which
antagonisms can articulate themselves, without any guarantee that the progressive side will win. Second, civil society as Havel conceived it is not, in
fact, a development of Heideggers thinking. The

essence of modern technology for Heidegger was not a set of institutions,

very ontological horizon that determines how we
experience Being today, how reality discloses itself to us . For that reason, Heidegger would have found the
practices and ideological attitudes that can be opposed, but the

concept of the power of the powerless suspect, caught in the logic of the Will to Power that it endeavours to denounce. Havels understanding that living
in truth could not be achieved by capitalism, combined with his crucial failure to understand the origins of his own critical impulse, has pushed him
towards New Ageism. Although the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery, at the same time they opened up a
space for utopian expectations which, among other things, facilitated the failure of Communism itself. What anti-Communist dissidents such as Havel
overlook, then, is that the

very space from which they criticised and denounced terror and
misery was opened and sustained by Communisms attempt to escape the logic of
capitalism. This explains Havels continuing insistence that capitalism in its traditional, brutal form cannot
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meet the high expectations of his anti-Communist struggle the need for authentic human solidarity etc.
This is, in turn, why Vclav Klaus, Havels pragmatic double, has dismissed Havel as a socialist.

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A/T Risk-Assessment Good/Key to Policy

Traditional risk assessment strips us of our relations to others and our dignitythis
obscures how structural violence contributes to large-scale destruction
OBrien 2000
[PhD, environmental scientist and activist (Mary, 2000, MIT Press, Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment,
Gigapedia, p. xvii-xviii,)

it is not acceptable for people to tell you that the harms to

which they will subject you and the world are safe or insignificant. You deserve to know
good alternatives to those harms, and you deserve to help decide which alternative will
be chosen. Underlying this book, however, is a less explicitly stated personal belief, namely that we humans will never dredge
up enough will to alter our habitual, destructive ways of behaving toward each other
and the world unless we simultaneously employ information and emotion and a sense
of relationship to othersother species, other cultures, and other generations. Using information while
divorced from emotion and using information while insulated from connection to a wide net of others are how
destruction of the Earth is being accomplished. Risk assessment of narrow options is a
classic example of using certain bits of information in such a way as to exclude feeling
and to artificially sever connections of parts to the whole. Risk assessment rips you (and
others) out of connection to the rest of the world and reduces you (if you are even considered at all in the risk
assessment) to a number. You are then consigned to damage or death or risk, depending
on how your number is shuffled around in models, assumptions, and formulas and
during risk management. Assessment of the pros and cons of a range of reasonable alternatives allows the connections to remain.
This book is based on the understanding that

The cultural emotions connected to a given alternative, for instance, can be a pro or a con, and may be both, depending on which sector of the

Risk
assessment is one of the major methods by which parts (corporations such as Monsanto or Hyundai, private
landowners, industrial nations) can act on their wants at the expense of wholes (e.g., whole communities and
countries, or the seventh generation from now) without appearing to be doing so. Risk assessment lets them
appear simply scientific or rational as they numerically estimate whether or how many deaths or what birth defects will
be caused, and ignore other regions of human experience that also matter to people. Always, some
community you inhabit. An advantage or a disadvantage of a given alternative can be social, religious, economic, scientific, or political.

groups of humans will be trying to exercise their power at the expense of the whole. Decisions arrived at by risk assessment can be homicidal, biocidal,

Risk assessment is a premier process by which illegitimate

exercise of power is justified. The stakes of installing alternatives to risk assessment, therefore, are the whole Earth (just as are the
and suicidal, but they are made every day.

stakes of fashioning democratic control over corporations, or of requiring changes in behavior of those who have wreaked irreparable damage).

Installing alternatives assessment is one step in the struggle to use information,

feeling, and a sense of relationship to others to stop socioenvironmental madness.

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A/T Utopianism/Not Real World

Japan empirically proves the K, and takes out their Not Real World Arguments
Dreyfus 93
(Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p. 307)
Heidegger, however, sees that "it would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We

there is a way
we can keep our technological devices and yet remain true to ourselves as receivers of
clearings: "We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them
the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature " (DT 54; G 24-25). To
depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances" (DT 53, G 24~. Instead, Heidegger suggests that

understand how this might be possible, we need an illustration of Heidegger's important distinction between technology and the technological
understanding of being. Again we can turn to Japan. In contemporary

Japan traditional, nontechnological practices

still exist alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption. The
television set and the household gods share the same shelf - the Styrofoam cup coexists
with the porcelain teacup. We thus see that the Japanese , at least, can enjoy technology
without taking over the technological understanding of being.

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A/T Util Good

Questioning flawed forms of technological ontology allows for better forms of
consequentialism
Housman and Flynn 2011
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011 MV]
This step towards hampering global warming and step back to the realm of meditative thinking that has been skipped over will lead to careful activity
in the spirit of guarding being and our nature. Heidegger says in his Letter on Humanism, Thinking comes to an end when it slips out of its element

thinking is the thinking of Being (1993 [1947], 220). He proceeds to say at the end of his letter, Thus
thinking is a deed. But a deed that also surpasses all praxis. Thinking towers above
action and production, not through the grandeur of its achievement and not as a
consequence of its effect, but through the humbleness of its inconsequential
accomplishment (262). Thus, thinking is an action, the highest action, insofar as it is a thinking of Being,
which has been forgotten in our current age. But this thinking of Being does not mean that deeds or
everyday praxis cease to exist or cease to have any significance in our daily lives.
Rather, deeds are now enriched due to the deed, thinking, which allows one to access
Being. Deeds undertake a more careful role in our lives and have more meaning behind them since they have been thought in relation to Being.
Said plainly,

Does this mean that through meditative thinking we will all arrive at the same solution, the same relation to being and adopt universal deeds that
everyone supports? Presumably not. Some people may be inspired to become hermits and radically limit or virtually eliminate the role of technology in
their lives altogether; others may adopt certain habits that they believe frees them from technologys authority; and others may devote themselves to

However one changes his

or her deeds, what remains consistent is that the person has now adopted an ethic of
care, has now freed himself from technologys dominion, has recognized the danger in
positionality and the largely calculative culture of modernity, and has transformed his or
her activity so that it resides closer to the humans essential nature . This way of being grants us the
developing new technical devices that do not deplete so many resources and do not distance us from Being.

opportunity to save our environment, if and only if the distress is felt widely and profoundly, and may be what Heidegger had in mind when he called for
us to say yes and no to technology.

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A/T Util Good- Turn

Utilitarianism denies the rule of a natural lawstrips us of our dignity and makes
human fulfillment impossible
George 07
[Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, Swarthmore College BA, Harvard Law School JD, Harvard Divinity School MTS, and Oxford
University DPhil (Robert P., 9 April 2007, Natural Law)]
Let me now turn to the ways in which natural law theories are both like and unlike utilitarian (and other consequentialist)

approaches to morality, on the one hand, and Kantian (or deontological) approaches on the other. Like
utilitarian approaches, and unlike Kantian ones, natural law theories are fundamentally concerned
with human well-being and fulfillment and, indeed, take basic human goods as the starting
points of ethical reflection. Unlike utilitarian approaches, however, they understand
the basic forms of human good (as they figure in options for morally significant choosing) as incommensurable
in ways that render senseless the utilitarian strategy of choosing the option that overall
and in the long run promises to conduce to the net best proportion of benefit to harm (in whatever way
benefit and harm may be understood and defined). Natural law theorists share the Kantian rejection of aggregative accounts of morality that regard
the achievement of sufficiently good consequences or the avoidance of sufficiently bad ones as justifying choices that would be excluded by application of
moral principles in ordinary circumstances. Unlike Kantians, however, natural law theorists do not believe that moral norms can be identified and
justified apart from a consideration of the integral directiveness of the principles of practical reason directing human choice and action towards what is
humanly fulfilling and away from what is contrary to human well-being. Natural law theorists do not believe in purely deontological moral norms.

Practical reasoning is reasoning about both the right and the good, and the two are
connected. The content of the human good shapes the moral norms applied in
judgments about right (and wrong) choices and actions. Moral norms themselves are entailments of the primary practical
principles that direct us to basic aspects of human well-being or fulfillment. These primary practical principles integral directiveness is articulated in the
master principle of morality and its specifications in moralitys norms.
Such a view presupposes the possibility of free choicethat is, choosing that is the pure product neither of external forces nor internal but subrational
motivating factors, such as sheer desire. Accordingly, a complete theory of natural law will in-clude an account of principles of practical reason, including

This en-tails the

rejection of strict rationalism, according to which all phenomena are viewed as caused .
moral norms as providing rational guidance for free choices, and a defense of free choice as a genuine possibility.

It understands human be-ingssome human beings, at least sometimesas partially uncaused causings of those realities that they bring into existence
for reasons but by choices that are free because underdetermined by reasons and passions alike. On the natural law account of human action, freedom
and reason are mutually entailed. If people were not really free to choose among optionsfree in the sense that nothing but the choosing itself settles
what option gets chosentruly rationally motivated action would not be possible. If rationally motivated action were not possible, the experience we
have of freely choosing would be illusory.
Philosophers in the natural law tradition, going all the way back to Aristotle, have emphasized the fact (or, in any event, what we believe to be the fact)

that by our choices and actions we not only alter states of affairs in the world external
to us, but also at the same time determine and constitute our-selves for better or worseas persons
with a certain character. Recognition of this self-shaping or intransitive quality of morally
significant choosing leads to a focus on virtues as habits born of upright choosing that
orient and dispose us to further upright choosing, especially in the face of temptations
to behave immorally. People sometimes ask: is natural law about rules or virtues? The answer is that it is about both. A complete theory
of natural law identifies norms for distinguishing right from wrong as well as habits or
traits of character whose cultivation disposes people to choose in conformity with the
norms and, thus, compatibly with what we might callborrowing a phrase from Kanta good will, a will towards
integral human fulfillment.

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A/T Util- Links to K

Util ignores nonmeasurable goods of human security and justifies atrocity, and is
another link to the K.
Grisez 78
[emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics (Germain, The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Volume 23 (1978): 21-72, Against Consequentialism,
http://www.twotlj.org/against-consequentialism.pdf, p. 27-8)]

First, the seemingly obvious statement that it is right to bring about the greater good or the
lesser evil assumes what is not obvious, namely, that goodness is measurable and that diverse forms of
it are commensurable. If there are nonmeasurable goods toward which human acts should be oriented, then acting only in view of
measurable good will mean ignoring goods which cannot be measured but should not
be ignored. If the consequences of one act include several goods and evils, how can one tell which good is greater, which evil is lesser?
Second, not all theories of the moral criterion are reviewed in the dialectic from which consequentialism emerges as the last resort. Many scholars think
that Aristole's ethics defies the usual classification. So does my own. I define moral right and wrong in terms of human goods, but not in terms of the
amount of good one expects to bring about.

measuring, counting, and weighing usual in practical

reasoning do not imply consequentialism. Sometimes the judgment one reaches
depends upon presupposed moral norms. The scales of justice weigh facts, not goods. Sometimes the judgment one
Third, I shall show in section four that the

reaches concerns nonmoral value and does not presuppose moral norms. A cost-effectiveness study clarifies the advantages and disadvantages of
possible projects. But such a judgment concerns the efficiency of techniques, not the morality of acts.
Fourth, there is no necessary relation between consequentialism and unselfishness. An egoist
can be a consequentialist; most consequentialists argue independently that one should not be an egoist. A theologian who appeals to Christian love in
support of consequentialism usually also admits that Christian love requires that one do what is morally right. Thus, if one assumes that the
requirements of Christian love are defined by consequentialism, one begs the question in its favor .

Utilitarian impartiality also appears less attractive if one considers the imaginary
counterexamples philosophers propose against utilitarianism. These are usually drawn from the fields of justice and personal integrity.
Would it be right to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number by isolating
one innocent person in a perpetual life of horrible torture? Would it be right to save a dozen suspects from a
lynch mob by offering one othernot more probably guilty than the dozenas a victim to the mob's wrath? As John Rawls points out,

utilitarianism does not take seriously enough the distinction between persons; it
merges the benefits and harms to everyone into a totality:
Thus there is no reason in principle why the greater gains of some should not
compensate for the lesser losses of others; or more importantly, why the violation of
the liberty of a few might not be made right by the greater good shared by many .6
Consequentialism implies that there are no intrinsically evil acts. This view can seem
attractive if one considers kinds of acts one holds to be morally acceptable. Most college students
today easily accept consequentialism in the field of sexual ethics. But consider: Would it ever be right for a professor to assign grades in a course, not
according to the work the students have done, but rather according to the extent to which they agree with him? Confronted with this question, students
usually begin to see that acts of some kinds are always wrong.

Treating others as ends not means is better than all types of utilitarianism
Fetzer 10professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science, former Marine Corps officer
(Jim, 18 March 2010, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Predator-Drones-The-Immor-by-Jim-Fetzer-100316-892.html, Predator Drones: The
Immoral Use of Autonomous Machines, )
We are now invading Pakistani air space in our relentless determination to take out those who oppose us. From the point of view of the countries that we
have invaded and occupied, they might be more aptly described as "freedom fighters." Since we invaded these countries in violation of international law,
the UN Charter and the US Constitution, we appear to be committing crimes against humanity.

We cannot know our conduct is

immoral, however, unless we know the nature of morality . Consider what are known as consequentialist and nonconsequentialist theories. Under consequentialism , for example, an action is right when it produces as much GOOD
(usually taken to be happiness) as any available alternative. But the problem remains of deciding FOR
WHOM that happiness ought to be produced.
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According to Ethical Egoism, for example, an action is right if it brings about as much happiness for you
personally as any available alternative. Consequences for others simply don't count. So Ted Bundy,
John Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, are home free morally speaking, though few juries would be likely to be
impressed by the argument that killing gave them more happiness than any available alternative. So Ethical Egoism does not adequately solve the
problem. According

to Limited Utilitarianism, by contrast, an action is right when it brings about as much

happiness for your group as any available alternative. This is good news for The Third Reich, the
Mafia, and General Motors. If no available alternative(s) would produce more happiness for Nazis than
territorial acquisition, military domination, and racial extermination, then those qualify as moral
actions if this theory is true. Predator drones are good if their use benefits your interests. The consequences for others, once again,
simply don't matter.
Classic Utilitarianism, among consequentialist theories, is the only one that dictates encompassing the effects actions
have upon everyone rather than some special class. But if a social arrangement with a certain
percentage of slaves, say, 15%, would bring about greater happiness for the population as a whole
because the increase in happiness of the masters outweighed the decrease in happiness of the slaves,
then that arrangement would qualify as moral, necessarily! So, if theories that qualify manifestly
immoral behavior as "moral" ought to be rejected, perhaps a non-consequentialist approach can do
better. According to what is known as Deontological Moral Theory, in particular, actions are moral when they
involve treating other persons with respect. More formally expressed, it requires that other persons should
always be treated as ends (as intrinsically valuable) and never merely as means
(instrumentally). Let us adopt this standard here.

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A/T K Primitive
The critique doesn't strive to recreate the past Merely to reject the demand that
nature become ordered and calculable The alternative breaks down the illusion and
allows for a better future
Heidegger 49
[Martin. The 20th centurys Slavoj. The Question Concerning Technology. 1949. JCOOK]

The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way not simply for technology but
for the essence of modern technology . For such gathering-together, which challenges man to reveal by way of ordering,
already holds sway in physics. But in it that gathering does not yet come expressly to the fore. Modern physics is the herald of enframing, a herald whose
provenance is still unknown. The essence of modern technology has for a long time been concealed, even where power machinery has been invented,
where electrical technology is in full swing, and where atomic technology is well under way. All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps
itself everywhere concealed to the last. Nevertheless, it remains, with respect to its holding sway, that which precedes all: the earliest. The Greek thinkers
already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with regard to its rise into dominance becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is !
primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in

the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think

through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revive
what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of the
dawn. Chronologically speaking, modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century. In contrast, machine-power technology develops only
in the second half of the eighteenth century. But modern technology, which for chronological reckoning is the later, is, from the point of view of the
essence holding sway within it, historically earlier. If

modern physics must resign itself ever increasingly to

the fact that its realm of representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being
visualized, this resignation is not dictated by any committee of researchers. It is
challenged forth by the rule of enframing, which demands that nature be orderable as
standing-reserve. Hence physics, in its retreat from the kind of representation that turns only to objects, which has been the sole
standard until recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that nature report itself in some way or other
that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information. This
system is then determined by a causality that has changed once again. Causality now displays neither the character of the occasioning that brings forth
nor the nature of the causa etficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reportinga reporting
challenged forthof standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence. To this shrinking would correspond the process of
growing resignation that Heisenberg's lecture depicts in so impressive a manner. 'Because the essence of modern technology lies in enframing,

modern technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing the deceptive appearance arises that modern
technology is applied physical science. This illusion can maintain itself precisely insofar as neither the essential
provenance of modern science nor indeed the essence of modern technology is adequately sought in
our questioning.

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A/T Science Good

Scientific knowledge is neither empirical nor objective but rather relies upon the same
subjective knowledge that it claims to reject their claims are state-constructed
manifestations of popular narratives
Jerkins 09
[humanities professor, 9Professor of Humanities at Florida State University (Jae, Winter 2009, Heideggers Bridge: The Social and Phenomenological
Construction of Mars, Florida Philosophical Review, Volume IX, Issue 2, )]

The tenuous relationship between the empirical and the fictive lends science the
availability to use other forms of knowledge, like narrative knowledge, to legitimate its activities. This narrative
knowledge is often the kind of knowledge that scientists are believed to shunostensibly, scientists dont tell stories, they present facts. Thus, empirical
knowledge is the proclaimed mandate of the scientist. Yet

it is often a narrative, and not empirical knowledge,

that is used to advocate and legitimate the activities of the scientific community and the
authoritative presence of their government structures.
Today, scientists studying Mars use the tools of the narrative of colonialismwith the enthusiasm of nationalism, the promises of corporate success, and
the desire to dominate new frontiersall to legitimate the project of going to Mars. When one legitimates an activity, they are promoting said activity as
authorized, validated, or normative.33 Both scientific and governmental discourses are legitimated by narrative, and yet scientific discourse tends to
push narrative aside as an inferior method of conveying knowledge.
There also exists a vague correlation between legitimation and truth. Jean-Franois Lyotard explains, The

language game of science

desires its statements to be true but does not have the resources to legitimate their truth on its own .34
The state tends to render science understandable by relating scientific knowledge to
popular knowledge, doing so by spend[ing] large amounts of money to enable
science to pass itself off as an epic.35 Scientific documentaries like MARS: Dead or Alive are saturated
with narratives, from the anthropomorphic rovers to the hostile land, because scientific
knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without
resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no
knowledge at all.36
This paradoxical viewpoint of scientific narratives threatens to render scientific accounts of Mars unchallengeable . Scientists attempt to
explain what Mars is like, but then use colonialist narratives, modernist narratives, and Hegelian narratives of
progress to induce the public into funding scientific projects . Thus, it becomes cumbersome to engage in dialogue
concerning the legitimacy of Martian endeavors when scientists utilize narrative to legitimate what they do, while dismissing narrative as non-science.
Instead, the

scientific discourse of Mars should be seen for what it isa changing, subjective, and
complex exchange of the narrative and the empirical, influenced by historical context, bureaucratic
powers, and the technological drive toward efficiency.
Martian Phenomenology
Thus, the

meaning of Mars comes to us, not empirically from a telescope, but first and foremost
hermeneutically through its discourse. This interpretive process means that there is no
absolutely objective knowledgeonly the changing interpretation of phenomena . Geneticist
Richard Lewontin maintains that

Even agreedon, widely practiced methodologies are culturally and historically situated...scientific
truth-claims have complex internal structures and complicated networks of external affiliations that
cannot be explained solely by reference to internal standards of legitimation. 37
And scientific thought turns the self into a disengaged subject that lacks any relation to
the world this anthropocentric worldview guarantees endless exploitation of the
universe
Guignon 04
[philosophy professor, 4Professor of Philosophy at USF, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (Charles, 2004, On Being Authentic, p. 16-17, )]

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A second crucial event in the emergence of the modern worldview was the rise of modern science . What
makes an early scientist like Galileo so impressive is not just the discoveries he makes, but his ability to see all reality as a universe, that is, as a vast,
homogeneous aggregate of material objects in contingent causal interactions. Seen

from this standpoint, the idea that reality

constitutes a meaningful order expressing a divine plan no longer makes any sense. There are no
proper functions for things, only ways that things have come to occupy a niche in
interactive causal systems. And there is no proper place for things , no pregiven telos that
determines that all things are contributing to the realization of a providential plan. The world is, as
the sociologist Max Weber says, disenchanted: the universe is conceived as a collection of objects in
efficient, push-pull causal interactions, with no mysterious or supernatural principles at work anywhere. Correlated with
this conception of what we can know about reality is a transformed understanding of the self who has such knowledge. The objectified and
mechanized view of things can arise only for a knowing subject who has stripped off all
prejudices and comfortable illusions inherited from the past and is able to adopt a
detached, impartial, dispassionate view of things. Scientific mastery of the world
requires that we adopt a stance in which we are disengaged subjects, methodical and
objective observers who are collecting data and formulating theories. Theory formation
itself requires a particular form of abstraction. According to the standard view of scientific method,
one starts with the phenomena given in observation and then abstracts out all subject-relative
properties of thingsthe properties things have only in relation to our forms of experience, such as beauty, usefulness, goodness, color, felt heat,
smellin order to isolate the properties that are essential to the thing as it is in itselfnamely, the features of a thing that can be quantified, such as

Only those properties of things that are quantifiable are regarded as really in the
things. Underlying the newly emerging science is a fundamental assumption that mathematical
idealization reveals reality as it is in itself. So Galileo claims that the grand book of the universecannot be understood unless
mass, velocity, and position.

one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its
characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one

Scientific abstraction calls for an ability to bracket or set aside the

commonsense views accepted by ones society as well as the age-old certainties one
unreflectively absorbs in growing up into the world. And that in turn calls for an ability to suspend all those
beliefs, commitments and concerns that traditionally were seen as definitive of the self .
The conception of the self that emerges with this ideal of knowledge is, as Charles Taylor suggests,
that of a dimensionless point of pure thought and will. The self comes to be seen as a subject, a center
of experience and action, set over against a world of objects that are to be known and
manipulated.5 Regarded as a subject, the self lacks any defining or essential relations to
anything in the world, even to its own body and emotions . For such a self, anything can be
objectified, held out at arms length and treated as a brute object to be modified and transformed to
suit our purposes. The worldview that emerges with the rise of modern science is
anthropocentric to the extent that it treats the human selfunderstood as the knowing
subject who objectifies, knows and controlsas the center of the universe . In terms of
such an anthropocentric view of things, everything that exists can be said to exist only insofar as it is
or can be an objectan ob-jectum: that which is thrown over against a knowing subject. What had been
claimed by the sophists in ancient Greece now becomes self-evident truth: Man is the measure of all things. At the end of this transition
what is left is a world consisting of raw materials at our disposal; nature is encountered, in
Heideggers words, as a giant filling station supplying energy for our needs.6 A tremendous feeling of
excitement accompanies the transformation in thinking wrought by the new science. Where before
our goal on earth might have been seen as finding our place in the cosmos or compliance with Gods
will, the new aim is seen as attaining power and mastery over nature. Descartes writes that our goal is to
make ourselves masters and possessors of nature,7 while Francis Bacon states quite simply, Knowledge is power. For the new
scientific outlook, there are no boundaries to human mastery over nature , only
temporary obstacles. Humans can remake the world according to a rational plan, and that means that
they can remake themselves as they wish.
wanders about in a dark labyrinth.4

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And Modern scientific thought mechanizes all things and reduces them to objective
facts this excludes the subjective and destroys the essence of Being and the meaning
to life ontological questioning solves
Lucht 06
[Assistant Professor of Philsophy at Alveria University, PhD in philosophy from Emory (Marc, no date given but latest cited in footnotes is 2006,
Towards a Phenomenology of Intercultural Dialogue, )]
Heidegger argues that nihilism arises largely from two metaphysical commitments orienting western thought: the sharp division between subject and
object, and the distinction between fact and value together with the reduction of what counts as real to just one the fact side of that distinction.

scientific
and technical modes of thinking are taken to be the sole legitimate modes of access to
truths about being, the less it is that anything not subject either to quantitative representation or technological subjection to practical ends
Especially the latter commitment, on which I shall focus in this essay, is tied closely to the authority of the natural sciences: the more

will be regarded as anything more than the correlate of mere subjective interpretation or preference. Indeed, Nietzsche shares Heideggers view of the

A scientific interpretation of the

world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning
that it would be one of the poorest in meaning [] But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless
world. Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in
link between nihilism and the authority of mathematical-technical modes of rationality:

formulas: how absurd would such a scientific estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really
nothing of what is music in it! Whereas Nietzsche typically emphasizes the impossibility of appeal to transcendent normative measures given the
demise of traditional metaphysics and the secularist rejection of religion, he recognizes as well the futility of the attempt to ground value in immanent
measures in a mechanistic world as represented in the mathematized sciences. This latter point is Heideggers primary focus. In the following, I shall
develop in more detail Heideggers view of the connection between the exclusive epistemological authority of the sciences and nihilism. For modern
theory since the 17th Century, Heidegger argues, the being of all beings is interpreted a priori as sheer material objectivity, or the totality of material
corporeality in its motion. Our conception of nature is conceived a priori as the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related
spatiotemporally. This

conception makes possible the rigorous objectification of nature

required for the precise results generated by modern scientific inquiry: the equivalence
of the real with extended matter (and with determinate quanta of energy) makes possible the formulaic
representation of nature in terms of quantitative magnitudes. Empirical research is
conducted always presupposing this model of nature, and thus only those phenomena
conforming to it are taken as legitimate objects of research, are taken to be at all:
whatever is comes to stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being . In
other words, Heidegger thinks that whereas the details of the particular laws governing the interaction
of objects are subject to discovery in subsequent research, a conception of the essence
of Being has always been decided upon in advance, and any research will be conducted presupposing and always
confirming this decision. Only those beings that were stipulated in advance to count as real ones
will be subject to investigation, and scientific research methods, as well as operative notions of justification and evidence, all will
be designed appropriately for investigation solely into determinate quanta of matter and energy. Heidegger claims that this interpretation of Being,
which he entitles metaphysical, has come to be decisive even for our common sense ideas about and ordinary perception of the world. Increasingly,
theory orients our common sense views of the nature of reality. (Indeed, it is striking how well Heideggers claim about scientific rationalitys
conditioning common sense bears out. I frequently ask my students, for instance, whom they would turn to in order to find out about what sort of thing
something real is. Inevitably they refer to physicists and chemists.) As for Descartes, for whom colors do not inhere as real properties in the thing that
appears colored, so for us phenomena that do not appear initially to be either matter or energy are either subject to the attempt to be reduced to and
understood in terms of quantitatively measurable primary qualities, or else are passed over as something merely subjective. We tend increasingly to
think that phenomena such as hope and humor are reducible to the disposition of neurons in brains, and phenomena such as the frightening, the good,
the proper, and the vile are conceived not as real properties of things, but as mere artifacts of judgments we make and feelings we have about things. In
education, we see increasing emphasis placed on quantitative assessments of student learning, as if even the learning of Socratically inspired philosophy
(with its emphases on ones recognition of ones own ignorance, on wonder, on intellectual liberty and the critique of convention, on openness to new
perspectives, on tenacity, and on virtue), is reducible to determinate bits of data and measurable outputs. What is real in learning, or real learning,
must, it seems, be measurable quantitatively. Immanuel Kants aesthetics provides a classic example of the consequences of such a metaphysical
interpretation of Being. Kant understands the world of phenomenal nature essentially in Newtonian and mechanistic terms. Thus when he performs his
analysis of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment, it turns out that judgments of taste are not strictly about the beautiful object at all, for
beauty and ugliness are not properties that can be assessed in a determinate judgment. Taste, for Kant, is nothing like a perspicacious ability to discern
in an object some property that constitutes its beauty. Thus judgments of taste refer not to the judged object, but back to the judging subject and to the
way in which the subject is affected by its encounter with the object. We assert that something is beautiful merely because our apprehension of it arouses
within us certain kinds of pleasure. The judgment that something is beautiful therefore is subjective, cannot be either true or false, and teaches us more
about the person making the judgment than about the thing judged. As Heidegger observes, with modernity our understanding of the significance of art
is relegated therefore to the discipline of aesthetics, and the art work becomes the object of mere subjective experience []. Everyone has his or her
own taste, and, as neither objective nor real, beauty cannot be isolated or measured. Instead, qualities such as beauty and ugliness are relative to each
persons sensibility. Now,

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nature appropriate not only for the goal of precise, objective knowledge of it, but
thereby also for technological manipulation . A world of objects is a world subject to intervention and manipulation. As
Descartes already knew, the objectivity of a being allows for the measurability presupposed by the project of acquiring mastery over that being.
Heidegger holds that beings are interpreted as material objectivity ultimately so that they become appropriate material for technological control. His
point is that theoretical reflection, which in its commitment to neutral objectivity so often seems and presents itself as normatively neutral, as
disinterested or unbiased, actually

aims at dominion. If he is right, then from its very inception modern

ontology has presupposed a normative bias, for it contains within it the express
orientation towards subjugating the natural world. (The point would hold for the human sciences as well as for the
natural sciences, as thinkers such as Michel Foucault have argued, for psychological and sociological theory is oriented towards the control and
normalization of human behavior.) Theoretical representation is finally in the service of the will to power, and, as such, in the modern age the earth
itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears
everywhere [] as the object of technology. Theorys aim, Heidegger says, has been to convert nature into a gigantic gasoline station. Heidegger thinks
that this systematic subjugation affects the way in which we take the world, the manner in which we even see it. One of his most thought-provoking

technology consists not merely in devices, but is connected with a way of

revealing or representing. Increasingly, he thinks, we attend, even in our ordinary lives, to nothing but objects
and resources, and it is more and more the case that even objective properties recede behind function. Ever more we
experience culture as distinct from nature, we experience ourselves as separate from
the world, and we encounter the world always and exclusively in terms of its capacity to
contribute to the satisfaction of our goals. Attending primarily to those features of the
things which bear upon our projects, we allow ourselves to be responsive to the world
merely in its possible instrumentality. What is the connection between scientific and technical modes of representation, on
claims, then, is that

the one hand, and nihilism on the other? Heidegger claims that the triumph of technical rationality results in a nihilistic darkening of the world, in
which phenomena such as beauty and moral categories are no longer thought of as real, as part of the world. For him, the metaphysical interpretation of
nature is reductive, for being is much richer than mere objects and resources, and the

delivering over of beings to a

universal objectification and the homogenization of all significance into instrumental
value correspond to a loss of meaning. The reduction of a being to an object results in a divorce of thing and (its) meaning.

In other words, the process of objectification fractures or disaggregates the thing into separate meaning and object components, and, for modern theory,
it is only the object side of that distinction that is considered real. If the real consists in nothing but physical objects and the forces that move them, then

phenomena such as meaning, significance, and value come to be relegated to the sphere
of the merely subjective or unreal. They are not properties of the world, but are taken to be functions of the ways in which
creatures with language and culture interpret the world. Values are not factual, they are not to be found within
material nature, so increasingly they appear less than fully real and seem subjective
and arbitrary. As I mentioned above, the distinction between fact and value combined with the reduction of the real to the former side of that
distinction threatens to result in the senselessness of all value. Thus Heidegger understands nihilism to be something like the pervasive and global loss of

and this loss is a direct consequence of modern metaphysics . For the thinking that is
ontology is
performed by the natural sciences, and must be distinguished from disciplines such as ethics. In education, as I mentioned
any mattering

grounded on modern metaphysics and its reduction of the real first to material objectivity and then to mere resource,

above, one sees the consequences of nihilism in the expectation that quantitative tools for assessment will reveal the ways in which teaching is or fails to
be successful. In philosophy, one sees the consequences of such nihilism in the devolution of the attempt to understand the human encounter with the
beautiful into the modern discipline of aesthetics, and in the slide of ethics into emotivism, theories of ideology, or one of the numerous currently
popular naturalistic descendants of psychologism and sociobiology. Aesthetics

and ethics, as dealing with values, meaning, and

imperatives, threaten to become merely subjective their subject matters come to be seen as functions of contingent human
preferences or conventions or interests, or perhaps, the accident of our biological constitution. In any case, since the imperatives that obligate us are not
to be found within the catalogue of material objects or resources, they are not subject to empirical measurement or technological manipulation, and thus
are taken to be less than fully real. Ethics therefore risks sacrificing its connection to truth, and as such risks losing its authoritative capacity to obligate
or forbid conduct. As Heidegger puts it, for modern metaphysics, Because [material] nature is what-is, freedom and the ought are not thought as Being.
The opposition of Being and the ought, Being and value, remains. Put differently, more existentially, when nothing is seen as inherently valuable, we
find ourselves adrift in an alien and indifferent world. Once this recognition takes hold, the beliefs about value that provided many of our endeavors with
their significance and justification seem to evaporate as ungrounded. One threat attendant upon belief in the subjectivity of value and the arbitrariness of

human
endeavor itself comes to be seen as irrelevant. The generalizations of the sociology and psychology of persuasion are
moral categories is that either human motivation devolves into mere hedonism and the culturally conditioned pursuit of self-interest, or

what I shall need to guide me, not the standards of normative rationality. If emotivism is true, this distinction is illusory. For evaluative utterance can in
the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others [] The sole
reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own.

Others are always means, never ends. Alternately, disagreements about the propriety of conduct may perhaps be defused
through bland appeals to tolerance, itself a value difficult if not impossible to justify given a commitment to the conventionality of norms. However,
appeals to the live and let live attitude of tolerance also seem inadequate morally. A broad commitment merely to tolerance leaves undetermined what
sorts of conduct are finally intolerable, if any, and if tolerance is indeed to have limits, it is unclear how one might establish the intolerability of some
particular kind of conduct in the absence of some other objective norm. More seriously, such appeals risk our resting satisfied with what D. Sperber
refers to as a kind of cognitive and cultural apartheid. A commitment to tolerance might have the unintended consequence of our cutting ourselves off

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from each other. For one thing, appeals to tolerance might originate in my own attempt to render myself immune from moral criticism or censure. They
also risk our relieving ourselves of the burdensome yet vitally important task of working together to correct or improve our moral commitments through
mutual criticism and the joint pursuit of what is best. For my purposes here, the lesson to be derived from Heideggers analysis of nihilism is that the

scientific
rationality denies the existence of those norms and values whose disclosure could make
possible the genuine resolution of disagreements. If one is not committed to the reality or objectivity of moral value,
exclusive emphasis on scientific and technical rationality poses a threat to attempts to avoid violence through authentic dialogue, for

then one will not entertain the possibility that one could be wrong in ones normative commitments. One might alter those commitments perhaps
because ones preferences changed, or because one might be convinced that holding to them no longer seemed to be in ones self-interest, but not
because one had allowed oneself to be persuaded rationally that they were grounded in false beliefs about what was good, or just, or beautiful. If we
relinquish the idea that beliefs about norms might be true or false, that they capture or fail to capture some normative state of affairs, then dialogue
threatens to collapse into the attempt to bring others to believe that their self-interest lies in doing things as we want them to do them. Dialogue becomes
little more than the struggle for influence and power among diverse interest groups. II Compelling alternatives to a nihilistic vision of life are to be found
both in the work of Immanuel Kant and in the phenomenological tradition. Kant holds that reason in its theoretical employment is limited to the
scientific representation of nature (or to analysis of the conditions of that representation), and has no capacity to disclose norms. Phenomenal nature is
knowable only as mechanism, and meaning and value are not to be found there. For Kant, however, ethics need not collapse into anything like
emotivism, for in its practical employment reason has the capacity not to discover but to legislate an authoritative and absolute moral standard in the
form of the moral law. Kants contribution to debates about the legitimacy and objectivity of moral standards is well known. Another compelling
response to nihilism is developed in the phenomenological tradition, and in the remainder of this essay, instead of examining Kants moral thinking, I
explore the resources that phenomenology and its attempt to enrich our conception of world by attending to its normative dimension can offer reflection
about intercultural dialogue. Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Erazim Kohk, all explore the
possibility that the representation of nature as nothing but quantitative magnitudes of matter and energy is reductive, and overlooks real dimensions of
the world such as value and meaning. (Indeed, Kant in the Critique of Judgment already begins to shift towards a more phenomenological position.
There, he suggests that reflective judgment has the capacity to orient us within a world of which we are a part and that is felt (though not known) as
meaningful.) Phenomenological

attention to what Stephen Galt Crowell calls the space of meaning

enables the disclosure of real (and not merely conventional) norms, and thus can help us counter
the nihilistic tendencies of contemporary common sense and its impoverished view of
being. In a short essay about Husserls notion of intentionality, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: [Things] abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful,

sympathetic, horrible, lovable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask, an inexhaustible and irreducible property which constitutes its very
nature and not the sum of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood. Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has
restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, with its havens of mercy and love [ If] we love a woman, it is because
she is lovable. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger attempt to enrich our conception of nature by developing a set of descriptive methods
enabling disclosure of dimensions of the world inaccessible to the mathematical empirical sciences. For them, reality does not consist merely in what is
measurable quantitatively; instead, they argue, meaning and value are incorporated into the constitution of nature itself. Nature is primordially
significant, and Heidegger observes that attending to such significance is what is at stake in Husserls injunction to return to the things themselves. He
entitles the other thinking that he is attempting to develop in response to the ubiquity of technical rationality Denken or Besinnung: To venture after
sense or meaning [Sinn] is the essence of reflecting [Besinnen]. Calculative,

scientific thinking, Heidegger says, is not

meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in
everything that is. Yet, as Joseph Fell notes, Heidegger thinks that the fundamental supportive and orienting meanings that reflection

seeks in the subjects interiority, in immanence, have not originated there, but have occurred antecedently in the world. Heidegger seeks to penetrate
beneath the theoretical biases shaping our thinking, reminding us of what he thinks we on some level always already know: that we recoil from
something with horror because it is horrible or vile, that we love someone because she is lovable, that we strive to preserve something because it is worth
preserving, and that, to use an example from Kohk, the chipmunks significance is not reducible simply to the role he fulfills in the economy of nature.
There is not only utility but also an integrity, a rightness to his presence. Heidegger seeks to remind us that we live and are involved within a
primordially, naturally meaningful world whose structures orient our involvement, and that this world is already unconcealed whenever man
unlocks his heart and engages in ordinary shaping and working, entreating and thanking. As Heidegger sees it, nihilism stems from a reductive,
impoverished ontology. In science, things are represented as inert matter or determinate quanta of energy. But Heidegger claims that we have tended to

Being, for him, is much richer than mere material objectivity, and he wants
prejudices that
narrow our attention to only those features of the world that are objective and
serviceable. Kohk says, With respect both to ourselves and to nature, we need to suspend all theory and ask,
without prior ontological prejudice, just what it is that in truth presents itself in lived experience itself. What this application
of the phenomenological reduction accomplishes is a view of the nature of reality for which Husserl argues strenuously,
the disclosure of being as intrinsically meaningful being, not mere being on which
meaning must first be imposed. The phenomenological project, then, is a sort of rehabilitation of the ancient idea of the cosmos.
understate the nature of the thing.

to cultivate a way of thinking with the capacity to allow beings to show themselves undistorted by the theoretical- scientific

(As Hans Jonas puts it, Heideggers thinking is a paganism that deifies the world. ) Heidegger thinks of nature in terms of the ancient physis, of which
the material nature of modern science is only a reductive and confused echo. Heidegger intends his phenomenology to heal the breach sundering thing

The
reintroduction of significance into nature bears upon morality because it forges a
connection between ontology and the disclosure of measures directing moral conduct
and commitment. How something matters will determine how I comport myself towards it. And, since meaning is real, this means that to
and meaning, thereby restoring values such as the ought to being. Heideggers phenomenology leads to a moral realism.

know what something is, is already to know the kind of claim it makes upon you: to recognize that someone or something is dignified is already to know
that that being is deserving of respect. Heidegger asks us to cultivate a value-sensitive vision, a responsive sensitivity to the meaningfulness of the world
around us. Our very apprehension of the world will help us achieve a proper orientation within it, will help guide and ground our conduct: Heidegger

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says, He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is, and he urges us to attend to beings in such a way that they reveal
themselves with respect to what and how they are in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them. The phenomenological
commitment to an originally meaningful world can offer a great deal to dialogue. For one thing, phenomenology offers hope of the possibility of isolating
real, non-relative, non-conventional norms. Dialogue then could consist not merely in the manipulative attempt to compel others to act as one wants
them to, but in the joint attempt to determine what is best. Disagreements, in such a case, may indeed be resolvable not just through compromise or
compulsion, but through the disclosure of objective and jointly recognized norms. Since bias can occlude ones apprehension of value, one challenge
participants in a dialogue would face, then, would be to help each other secure more disinterested viewpoints from which to consider a situation, would
be to help each other see more clearly by pointing out distortions introduced by theoretical assumptions and self-interest. What is more, if Heidegger is
right, scientific

and technical modes of thinking contribute to nihilism by reinforcing a

reductive vision of the world. Such thinking is unsuited for the apprehension or disclosure of value. Accordingly, many
phenomenologists, such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, have turned to disciplines such as art and literature, as capable of attuning us to
dimensions of the world typically overlooked in more traditional models of theory. Phenomenology reminds us that dialogue must not restrict itself to
technical matters accessible best to scientific, instrumental, and economic rationality, but should incorporate exploration of the multiplicity of ways in
which phenomena manifest themselves as significant. Intercultural dialogue capable of considering and evaluating norms should be informed by a kind
of multicultural aesthetics of natural and cultural phenomena, by attention to the diverse modes in which the meaningful phenomena constituting
situations come to presence. At the same time, phenomenology can give hope to those searching for common ground with interlocutors from even very
foreign cultures. For it provides the means to uncover the variegated and shared life-world constituted by our pre-reflective, everyday, embodied
orientation towards things. Husserl reminds us that the life-world is the always antecedently given horizon for all activities and possible praxis, and
that this universal horizon is co-experienced as a shared world:

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A/T Realism Good

Realism is a hegemonic form of knowledge production that allows violence to permeate
beingthe impact is extinction
Burke 07
[Burke, professor of politics and IR, 7Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales (Anthony,
Theory & Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence and Reason, Project MUSE, )]
His essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based
either on a given sequence of events, threats,

insecurities and political manipulation , or the play of institutional,

economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow
over a deeper bedrock of modern reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of
common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and
'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than
merely arguments, rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political
leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than
that.

They are truth-systems of the most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in
modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied
privilege to state what is and how it must be maintained as it is.
I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the
nation-state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development
and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival).
These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some
phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17
In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status
of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and
contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in
its most sweeping and powerful form.
I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the

a drive for ideational hegemony and

closure that limits debate and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a
particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being , in the truth of truth
existential and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim:

as such. The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that generates
violence. Here we

are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of

violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies are especially dangerous because each
alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either
in scale and duration, or in unintended effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked
up and used on occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being.
This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F.
Hegel) and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a
mutually reinforcing system of support and justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin
Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for
use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic
problem arises because force so often produces

neither the linear system of effects imagined in

strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in
upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in
Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every
war employs arms that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are
made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them
betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21
What I am trying to describe in this essay is a complex relation between, and interweaving of, epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these
are distinct modes of knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft and violence they are made to blur together,
continually referring back on each other, like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular systemic
roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of
predictability and reliability to policy and political action, which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them
into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it may be useful to see ontology as a more

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totalising and metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and instrumental; but while a distinction between
epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology (knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.
The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic clarity about techniques of military and
geopolitical action which use force and coercion to achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national existence, security,

instrumental violence is
married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself admits no
questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential
or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First,

predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an
ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy

as a technique not merely becomes an

instrument of state power but ontologises itself in a technological image of 'man' as a
maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity
outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's terms, technology becomes being; epistemology
immediately becomes technique, immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006
Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the
IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan
Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a
war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli
public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22
The danger obviously raised here is that these

dual ontologies of war link being, means, events and

decisions into a single, unbroken chain whose very process of construction cannot be
examined. As is clear in the work of Carl Schmitt, being implies action, the action that is war. This chain is also obviously at work in the U.S.
neoconservative doctrine that argues, as Bush did in his 2002 West Point speech, that 'the only path to safety is the path of action', which begs the
question of whether strategic practice and theory can be detached from strong ontologies of the insecure nation-state.23 This is the direction taken by
much realist analysis critical of Israel and the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.24 Reframing such concerns in Foucauldian terms, we could argue
that obsessive ontological commitments have led to especially disturbing 'problematizations' of truth.25 However such rationalist critiques rely on a
one-sided interpretation of Clausewitz that seeks to disentangle strategic from existential reason, and to open up choice in that way. However

without interrogating more deeply how they form a conceptual harmony in Clausewitz's thought -and thus in our dominant understandings of politics and war -- tragically violent 'choices' will continue to be
made.
The essay concludes by pondering a normative problem that arises out of its analysis: if the divisive ontology of the national security state and the violent
and instrumental vision of 'enframing' have, as Heidegger suggests, come to define being and drive 'out every other possibility of revealing being', how
can they be escaped?26 How can other choices and alternatives be found and enacted? How is there any scope for agency and resistance in the face of
them? Their social and discursive power -- one that aims to take up the entire space of the political -- needs to be respected and understood. However,

we are far from powerless in the face of them. The need is to critique dominant images
of political being and dominant ways of securing that being at the same time, and to act and
choose such that we bring into the world a more sustainable, peaceful and non-violent global rule of the political.
Friend and Enemy: Violent Ontologies of the Nation-State
In his Politics Among Nations Hans Morgenthau stated that 'the national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national
security, which is the irreducible minimum that diplomacy must defend with adequate power and without compromise'. While Morgenthau defined
security relatively narrowly -- as the 'integrity of the national territory and its institutions' -- in a context where security was in practice defined
expansively, as synonymous with a state's broadest geopolitical and economic 'interests', what was revealing about his formulation was not merely the
ontological centrality it had, but the sense of urgency and priority he accorded to it: it must be defended 'without compromise'.27 Morgenthau was a
thoughtful and complex thinker, and understood well the complexities and dangers of using armed force. However his formulation reflected an

security was
conceived in modern political thought as an existential condition -- a sine qua non of life and sovereign political existence -and then married to war and instrumental action, it provides a basic underpinning for either the limitless resort
to strategic violence without effective constraint , or the perseverance of limited war (with its inherent tendencies to
influential view about the significance of the political good termed 'security'. When this is combined with the way in which

escalation) as a permanent feature of politics. While he was no militarist, Morgenthau did say elsewhere (in, of all places, a far-reaching critique of
nuclear strategy) that the 'quantitative and qualitative competition for conventional weapons is a rational instrument of international politics'.28
The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the
political community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended
from enemies within and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent,
legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision not merely of political order but of
existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set
out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent
alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single
moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its essential character from its own point of view is its
singleness':
Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states,
each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to
another and as if the negative were something external.30
Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities,
and for understanding how such a rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state
'presupposes the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The enemy is 'the other, the

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stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in an extreme case
conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as 'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not
political and a people cannot be said to exist:
Only the actual participants can correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge
whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of
existence.33
Schmitt links this stark ontology to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar
collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole
nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy
distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition:
the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their
real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the
enemy.35
Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political signifies nothing but devastating war and
every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard to accept his caveat at face
value.36

When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an
ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can
be a rational way of resolving political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political'
conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says: 'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37
Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support
and justification.

This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers .
Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is conceived in
terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the
other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted
of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy
and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or
quarantined from critical enquiry, as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and
unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social

We ignore the complex history of

a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its resolution that such historical analysis
might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature; as
possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable . Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and
sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to military violence.

the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such ontologies in action.

Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability whereby a people can judge whether their
'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel
similarly argues that:
...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury
the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence
mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as
a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39

Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is put at stake in such thinking
and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further extreme of an absolute
demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau,
for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century
and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led
assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western
responses to the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we
didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way, in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and
(all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by conservatives to justify military adventurism and a
rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians.
On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy
for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does
not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will of peoples:
When whole communities go to war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the
occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42
Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an
inherent tension between its tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining war as policy, to prevent war becoming
'a complete, untrammelled, absolute manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of 'primordial
violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an
instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a theoretical unity.44
The idea that national identities could be built and redeemed through war derived from the 'romantic counter-revolution' in philosophy which opposed
the cosmopolitanism of Kant with an emphasis on the absolute state -- as expressed by Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bismarkian Realpolitik and
politicians like Wilhelm Von Humbolt. Humbolt, a Prussian minister of Education, wrote that war 'is one of the most wholesome manifestations that
plays a role in the education of the human race', and urged the formation of a national army 'to inspire the citizen with the spirit of true war'. He stated

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that war 'alone gives the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void'.45 In the
Phenomenology of Mind Hegel made similar arguments that to for individuals to find their essence 'Government has from time to time to shake them to
the very centre by war'.46
The historian Azar Gat points to the similarity of Clausewitz's arguments that 'a people and a nation can hope for a strong position in the world only if
national character and familiarity with war fortify each other by continual interaction' to Hegel's vision of the ethical good of war in his Philosophy of
Right.47 Likewise Michael Shapiro sees Clausewitz and Hegel as alike in seeing war 'as an ontological investment in both individual and national
completion...Clausewitz figures war as passionate ontological commitment rather than cool political reason...war is a major aspect of being.'48
Hegel's text argues that war is 'a work of freedom' in which 'the individual's substantive duty' merges with the 'independence and sovereignty of the
state'.49 Through war, he argues,
the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea
from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so the corruption in nations would be the product of a prolonged, let alone 'perpetual'
peace.50
Hegel indeed argues that 'sacrifice on behalf of the individuality of the state is a substantial tie between the state and all its members and so is a universal
duty...if the state as such, if its autonomy, is in jeopardy, all its citizens are duty bound to answer the summons to its defence'.51 Furthermore, this is not
simply a duty, but a form of self-realisation in which the individual dissolves into the higher unity of the state:
The intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of
courage is to actualise this end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of
extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one's freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only a cog
playing its part in the mechanism of an external organisation; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete
absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting; the most hostile and so most
personal action against individuals, coupled with an attitude of complete indifference or even liking towards them as individuals.52
A more frank statement of the potentially lethal consequences of patriotism -- and its simultaneously physical and conceptual annihilation of the
individual human being -- is rarely to be found, one that is repeated today in countless national discourses and the strategic world-view in general. (In
contrast, one of Kant's fundamental objections to war was that it involved using men 'as mere machines or instruments'.53) Yet however bizarre and
contradictory Hegel's argument, it constitutes a powerful social ontology: an apparently irrefutable discourse of being. It actualises the convergence of
war and the social contract in the form of the national security state.
Strategic Reason and Scientific Truth
By itself, such an account of the nationalist ontology of war and security provides only a general insight into the
perseverance of military violence as a core element of politics. It does not explain why so many policymakers think military violence works. As I argued
earlier, such an ontology is

married to a more rationalistic form of strategic thought that claims to

link violent means to political ends predictably and controllably, and which, by doing so,
combines military action and national purposes into a common -- and thoroughly modern -horizon of certainty. Given Hegel's desire to decisively distil and control the dynamic potentials of modernity in thought, it is helpful to
focus on the modernity of this ontology -- one that is modern in its adherence to modern scientific models of truth, reality and technological progress,
and in its insistence on imposing images of scientific truth from the physical sciences (such as mathematics and physics) onto human behaviour, politics
and society. For example, the military theorist and historian Martin van Creveld has argued that one of the reasons Clausewitz was so influential was that
his 'ideas seemed to have chimed in with the rationalistic, scientific, and technological outlook associated with the industrial revolution'.54 Set into this

all of the world's

resources -- mineral, animal, physical, human -- are made part of a machinic process of which war and
violence are viewed as normal features.
epistemological matrix, modern politics and government engages in a sweeping project of mastery and control in which

These are the deeper claims and implications of Clausewitzian strategic reason. One of the most revealing contemporary examples comes from the
writings (and actions) of Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and later U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He wrote during the
Vietnam war that after 1945 U.S. foreign policy was based 'on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the
international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries'. This 'scientific revolution' had 'for all practical purposes,
removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy'.55
Kissinger's conviction was based not merely in his pride in the vast military and bureaucratic apparatus of the United States, but in a particular
epistemology (theory of knowledge). Kissinger asserted that the West is 'deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,
that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data -- the more accurately the better'. This, he claimed, has since the Renaissance set the West
apart from an 'undeveloped' world that contains 'cultures that have escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking' and remain wedded to the
'essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost entirely internal to the observer'.56
At the same time, Kissinger's hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of nuclear weapons proliferation and
constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy of new post-colonial states, order and mastery
were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which
'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values,
goals, expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an
agreed concept of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis and certainty that would
entrench U.S. hegemony:
For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to
reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational" concept of international
order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the
creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two
superpowers.58
Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be
worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue
in a phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to 'evoke the creativity of
a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This

is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to

control nature, technology, society and human beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned
or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already decided that U.S.
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power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion , to
abandon their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the
people of Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of dja vu as another Republican
Administration crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam
Hussein from power.

we are witness to an
enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in
the face of continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of McNamara
In this struggle with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation,

and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of technology and the machine: the machine
as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order. In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial
rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the
different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger analogously invoked the virtues of 'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades
later, was anxious that technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its associated
rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61
We sense the rational policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power and governmental
reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was
little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said:
...envisions a seat of power in the West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet
commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the East -- human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed
by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance.62

This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an
intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought , and was a major impetus to the
development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's Newtonian desire for the 'accurate'
gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of
natural science, in the hope of finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it
crystallised in philosophical terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key

figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo,

combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a
positivist epistemology and a nave faith in the goodness of invention . Bacon sought to create
Isaac Newton, and Ren Descartes, who all

certainty and order, and with it a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of
experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental
and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes sought to conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new
method that moved progressively out from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely granted
faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical reasoning, its
quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege
'objective', quantifiable qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain
knowledge of the world'.65
Such doctrines of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of systems analysis, game theory,
cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the
innermost secrets of matter and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic bomb. Yet this
new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded by the science could never be
translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and rational strategy.66
Bacon thought of the new scientific method not merely as way of achieving a purer access to truth and epistemological certainty, but as liberating a new
power that would enable the creation of a new kind of Man. He opened the Novum Organum with the statement that 'knowledge and human power are
synonymous', and later wrote of his 'determination...to lay a firmer foundation, and extend to a greater distance the boundaries of human power and
dignity'.67 In a revealing and highly negative comparison between 'men's lives in the most polished countries of Europe and in any wild and barbarous
region of the new Indies' -- one that echoes in advance Kissinger's distinction between post-and pre-Newtonian cultures -- Bacon set out what was at
stake in the advancement of empirical science: anyone making this comparison, he remarked, 'will think it so great, that man may be said to be a god
unto man'.68
We may be forgiven for blinking, but in Bacon's thought 'man' was indeed in the process of stealing a new fire from the heavens and seizing God's power
over the world for itself. Not only would the new empirical science lead to 'an improvement of mankind's estate, and an increase in their power over
nature', but would reverse the primordial humiliation of the Fall of Adam:
For man, by the fall, lost at once his state of innocence, and his empire over creation, both of which can be partially recovered even in this life, the first
by religion and faith, the second by the arts and sciences. For creation did not become entirely and utterly rebellious by the curse, but in consequence of
the Divine decree, 'in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; she is now compelled by our labours (not assuredly by our disputes or magical
ceremonies) at length to afford mankind in some degree his bread...69
There is a breathtaking, world-creating hubris in this statement -- one that, in many ways, came to characterise western modernity itself, and which is
easily recognisable in a generation of modern technocrats like Kissinger. The Fall of Adam was the Judeo-Christian West's primal creation myth, one that
marked humankind as flawed and humbled before God, condemned to hardship and ambivalence. Bacon forecast here a return to Eden, but one of man's
own making. This truly was the death of God, of putting man into God's place, and no pious appeals to the continuity or guidance of faith could disguise
the awesome epistemological violence which now subordinated creation to man. Bacon indeed argued that inventions are 'new creations and imitations
of divine works'. As such, there is nothing but good in science: 'the introduction of great inventions is the most distinguished of human
actions...inventions are a blessing and a benefit without injuring or afflicting any'.70
And what would be mankind's 'bread', the rewards of its new 'empire over creation'? If the

new method and invention brought

modern medicine, social welfare, sanitation, communications, education and comfort, it also enabled the Armenian genocide, the
Holocaust and two world wars; napalm, the B52, the hydrogen bomb, the Kalashnikov rifle and military strategy.
Indeed some of the 20th Century's most far-reaching inventions -- radar, television, rocketry, computing, communications, jet aircraft, the Internet -would be the product of drives for national security and militarisation. Even the inventions Bacon thought so marvellous and transformative -- printing,
gunpowder and the compass -- brought in their wake upheaval and tragedy: printing, dogma and bureaucracy; gunpowder, the rifle and the artillery

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battery; navigation, slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In short, the legacy of the new empirical science would be ambivalence as much as
certainty; degradation as much as enlightenment; the destruction of nature as much as its utilisation.
Doubts and Fears: Technology as Ontology
If Bacon could not reasonably be expected to foresee many of these developments, the idea that scientific and technological progress could be destructive
did occur to him. However it was an anxiety he summarily dismissed:
...let none be alarmed at the objection of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes and the like, for the same can
be said of every worldly good; talent, courage, strength, beauty, riches, light itself...Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by
the gift of God, and obtain that power, whose exercise will be governed by right reason and true religion.71
By the mid-Twentieth Century, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such fears could no longer be so easily wished away, as the physicist and
scientific director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised. He said in a 1947 lecture:
We felt a particularly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting and in the end in large measure achieving the realization of atomic
weapons...In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a
knowledge they cannot lose.72
Adam had fallen once more, but into a world which refused to acknowledge its renewed intimacy with contingency and evil. Man's

empire over

creation -- his discovery of the innermost secrets of matter and energy, of the fires that fuelled the stars -- had not 'enhanced human power and
dignity' as Bacon claimed, but instead brought destruction and horror. Scientific powers that had been
consciously applied in the defence of life and in the hope of its betterment now
threatened its total and absolute destruction. This would not prevent a legion of scientists, soldiers and national

security policymakers later attempting to apply Bacon's faith in invention and Descartes' faith in mathematics to make of the Bomb a rational weapon.
Oppenheimer -- who resolutely opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb -- understood what the strategists could not: that the weapons resisted
control, resisted utility, that 'with the release of atomic energy quite revolutionary changes had occurred in the techniques of warfare'.73 Yet Bacon's
legacy, one deeply imprinted on the strategists, was his view that truth and utility are 'perfectly identical'.74 In 1947 Oppenheimer had clung to the hope
that 'knowledge is good...it seems hard to live any other way than thinking it was better to know something than not to know it; and the more you know,
the better'; by 1960 he felt that 'terror attaches to new knowledge. It has an unmooring quality; it finds men unprepared to deal with it.'75
Martin Heidegger questioned this mapping of natural science onto the social world in his essays on technology -- which, as 'machine', has been so crucial
to modern strategic and geopolitical thought as an image of perfect function and order and a powerful tool of intervention. He commented that, given
that modern technology 'employs exact physical science...the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science'.76 Yet as the
essays and speeches of Oppenheimer attest, technology

and its relation to science, society and war cannot

be reduced to a noiseless series of translations of science for politics, knowledge for force, or force for
good.
Instead, Oppenheimer saw a process frustrated by roadblocks and ruptured by irony; in his view there was no smooth, unproblematic translation of
scientific truth into social truth, and technology was not its vehicle. Rather his comments raise profound and painful ethical questions that resonate with
terror and uncertainty. Yet this

has not prevented technology becoming a potent object of desire,

not merely as an instrument of power but as a promise and conduit of certainty itself. In
the minds of too many rational soldiers, strategists and policymakers, technology brings with it the truth of its enabling science and spreads it over the
world. It turns epistemological certainty into political certainty; it turns control over 'facts' into control over the earth.
Heidegger's insights into this phenomena I find especially telling and disturbing -- because they underline the ontological force of the instrumental view
of politics. In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger's striking argument was that in the modernising West technology is not merely a tool, a

'means to an end'. Rather technology has become a governing image of the modern universe, one that has come to
order, limit and define human existence as a 'calculable coherence of forces' and a 'standing reserve' of energy. Heidegger wrote: 'the threat to man does
not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his
essence.'77
This process Heidegger calls 'Enframing' and through it the scientific mind demands that 'nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable
through calculation and remains orderable as a system of information'. Man is not a being who makes and uses machines as means, choosing and
limiting their impact on the world for his ends; rather man has imagined the world as a machine and humanity everywhere becomes trapped within its
logic. Man, he writes, 'comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall...where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile Man, precisely
as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.'78 Technological man not only becomes the name for a project of lordship and
mastery over the earth, but incorporates humanity within this project as a calculable resource. In strategy, warfare

and geopolitics
aspirations are caught, transformed and perverted by such calculating,
enframing reason: human lives are reduced to tools, obstacles, useful or obstinate
matter.
human bodies, actions and

This tells us much about the enduring power of crude instrumental versions of strategic thought, which relate not merely to the actual use of force but to
broader geopolitical strategies that see, as limited war theorists like Robert Osgood did, force as an 'instrument of policy short of war'. It was from within
this strategic ontology that figures like the Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling theorised the strategic role of threats and coercive
diplomacy, and spoke of strategy as 'the power to hurt'.79 In the 2006 Lebanon war we can see such thinking in the remark of a U.S. analyst, a former
Ambassador to Israel and Syria, who speculated that by targeting civilians and infrastructure Israel aimed 'to create enough pain on the ground so there
would be a local political reaction to Hezbollah's adventurism'.80 Similarly a retired Israeli army colonel told the Washington Post that 'Israel is
attempting to create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters by exacting a heavy price from the elite in Beirut. The message is:
If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action
toward shutting down Hezbollah-land.'81
Conclusion: Violent Ontologies or Peaceful Choices?
I was motivated to begin the larger project from which this essay derives by a number of concerns. I felt that the available critical, interpretive or
performative languages

of war -- realist and liberal international relations theories, just war theories, and various Clausewitzian derivations
perform or refuse to place under suspicion the underlying
political ontologies that I have sought to unmask and question here. Many realists have quite nuanced and critical attitudes to the use of
of strategy -- failed us, because they either

force, but ultimately affirm strategic thought and remain embedded within the existential framework of the nation-state. Both liberal internationalist and

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just war doctrines seek mainly to improve the accountability of decision-making in security affairs and to limit some of the worst moral enormities of
war, but (apart from the more radical versions of cosmopolitanism) they fail to question the ontological claims of political community or strategic
theory.82
In the case of a theorist like Jean Bethke Elshtain, just war doctrine is in fact allied to a softer, liberalised form of the Hegelian-Schmittian ontology. She
dismisses Kant's Perpetual Peace as 'a fantasy of at-oneness...a world in which differences have all been rubbed off' and in which 'politics, which is the
way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets eliminated.'83 She remains a committed liberal democrat and espouses a moral
community that stretches beyond the nation-state, which strongly contrasts with Schmitt's hostility to liberalism and his claustrophobic distinction
between friend and enemy. However her image of politics -- which at its limits, she implies, requires the resort to war as the only existentially satisfying
way of resolving deep-seated conflicts -- reflects much of Schmitt's idea of the political and Hegel's ontology of a fundamentally alienated world of
nation-states, in which war is a performance of being. She categorically states that any effort to dismantle security dilemmas 'also requires the
dismantling of human beings as we know them'.84 Whilst this would not be true of all just war advocates, I suspect that even as they are so concerned
with the ought, moral theories of violence grant too much unquestioned power to the is. The problem here lies with the confidence in being -- of 'human
beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies)

antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of
being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others,
provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85
My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86
Even as I am arguing that war

is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is

rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest
some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international
society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern
republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I

think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply
endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives

out every other possibility of

revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and
hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87
What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence
and security -- is a view that the

challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon,

government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and
understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence . Many of the most
destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and

derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their

particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political
truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an
epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their
actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the
name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of
ecological destruction --

action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints
-- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of
discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic.

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A/T Realism
Realism isn't inevitable - their authors are wrong - the 1NCs attempt to question
security is key
Mantle 06
[Lecturer in the College of International Relations @ Ritsumeikan University, Defending the Dugong: Redefining Security in Okinawa and Japan", pg.
90, http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/cg/ir/college/bulletin/e-vol.5/MANTLE.pdf]
Although critical scholars, within IR generally and the study of security specifically, draw on a variety of theoretical traditions from within and beyond

a common
understanding is that the way things are is only one of many possibilities. As Berger and
Luckmann state, Social order exists only as a product of human activity (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 70,
emphasis in original). Humans construct their own realities, and within those realities their own
identities. What is named as male, female, art or nature is given meaning and value particular to a time and culture. This specific
meaning is constructed and then reconstructed daily through language and social
custom. Once the temporal and cultural contingency of such concepts is recognised, what has been assumed to be real, inevitable and immutable
the disciplinary borders of IR, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and Post-Modernism/Post-Structuralism,

can be challenged. Such critical thinking is a profound challenge for IR as a discipline and the study of security within the discipline. Anarchy is what
states make of it says Alexander Wendt (1992: 395). Booth takes this one step further, security is what we make it (Booth, 1997: 106, emphasis added).

Saying that thinking about politics and doing politics can be done differently opens up
the space for change. Since power is integral to any social relation, security can be
seen as sociopolitical construct. As one concept of security becomes dominant others are ridiculed, suppressed or not even
considered. Since such perceptions are often entrenched to the point of naturalness,
problematizing them is potentially disturbing and even threatening. The status quo is
the status quo because it suits those who have the power to define and keep it that way.
Nevertheless, without such dangerous critical questions little substantive change can
occur.
And inevitability is a self-fulfilling prophecy
Kim 84
[Samuel S, Dept of Poli Sci Monmouth College, Global
187]

Violence and a Just World Order, Journal of Peace Research, no 2, 1984 p.

This pacified and disarmed consciousness or alienation in Marxian terms - has allowed the managers of the national security superstate to shift both
their military doctrine and hardware toward making nuclear war more thinkable, more fightable, and more 'winnable'. The resultant expectations of
nuclear war do not augur well, for, as

social psychologist Gordon Allport put it: 'The greatest menace to the
world today are leaders in office who regard war as inevitable and thus prepare their
people for armed conflict. For by regarding war as inevitable, it becomes inevitable.
Expectations determine behavior' (Allport 1968, p. 11).
And the alternative solves the imbalances of power that we. The alternative also solves
for Realism's inability to view Beings, which entraps them in the Realist perspective.
Dallmayr 04
[PhD, Professor, Department of Government and International Studies, Notre Dame, Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004 The Underside of Modernity:
Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel Fred Dallmayr).//JRC]

the reflective recovery

of the question of and care for being, a care completely immune to managerial manipulation. As
Moving beyond the critique of Machenschaft, Besinnung offers glimpses of a radically other possibility: namely,

before, Heidegger distinguishes between power and violence, on the one hand, and genuine authority (Herrschaft), on the other. Apart from exuding

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intrinsic dignity or worth, he writes, Herrschaft means the free potency or capacity for an original respect for being (rather than merely empirical
things). To characterize this dignity, Besinnung introduces a new vocabulary, by

presenting being (Seyn) as a basically power-free

power and non-power or impotence (jenseits von Macht und Unmacht). As Heidegger
emphasizes, power-free does not mean powerless or impotent, because the latter remains fixated on power, now experienced as a lack. From an
everyday realist angle, beings realm may appear powerless or impotent; but this is
only a semblance or illusion resulting from its reticent inobstrusiveness. Due to its reticence,
beings realm can never be dragged into human machinations, into the struggles
between the powerful and the powerless (as long as the latter merely seek power); but precisely in this manner it
reveals its Herrschaft, a reign that cannot be matched by any power or superpower because they
necessarily ignore the nature of the basically power-free possibility. To be sure, access to this reign
is difficult and radically obstructed by the Machenschaft of our age. Yet, an important pathway through and beyond
these obstructions is offered by meditative thinking (Besinnung) which opens a glimpse into the time-space-play
domain (das Machtlose) beyond

(Zeit-Spiel- Raum) of being as Ereignis, that is, into the interplay and differential entwinement of being and beings, of humans, nature, and the divine.

And their proclaimed inevitability arguments are based off of subjective realist
viewpoints. Fusion with critical thinking includes more accurate conclusions
Zalewski and Enloe 95
[Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales **Professor of Government at Clark University (Marysia and Cynthia, 1995, International
Relations Theory Today, pg. 299]

The positivist conception of the world and reality typifies much of mainstream
international relations theory in the 1990s despite the emergence of the 'third debate'
or the so-called post-positivist revolution. This understanding of the world allows the
possibility of thinking that defining specific referents or identities as the central issues
in international relations theory is not a particularly political or epistemologically
significant act; it is merely one of choice. In other words, the choice of referent is seen
as a neutral activity by positivists. Waltz can choose to study states, wars and the activity of leaders, others can look at the
situation of women or whatever group they wish. Each then collects data and facts about the chosen group and ultimately develops theories about them.
Jim George calls this the 'spectator theory of knowledge, in which knowledge of the real world is gleaned via a realm of external facts' (1993, p. 204).
Mark Neufeld similarly talks about 'truth as correspondence' (1993, p. 55). This involves believing that there is a distinct separation between 'theory' and
the 'real' world, 'the former, the realm of "internally" generated "invention" - the latter, the "external" repository of laws which theories (retrospectively)

The key point to be taken

from this is that theory is represented as a 'cognitive reaction to reality rather than
integral to its construction. Theory, in this context, takes place after the fact' (p. 213).But
theory does not take place after the fact. Theories, instead, play a large part in
constructing and defining what the facts are. This is a central claim made by those
scholars working on postpositivist perspectives in international relations theory but it
is not a new claim. Albert Einstein once pointed out that 'on principle it is quite wrong to try founding a
theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens' (quoted in
MacKinnon, 1989, p. 106). However, it is a claim resisted strongly by mainstream international
relations theory, which remains, despite recent claims to the contrary, entrenched in a
realist-positivist paradigm (Runyan and Peterson, 1991; Peterson, 1992b; George, 1993). When vilified for serving
the interests of the powerful and preserving the status quo, classical and neo-realists
simply reply that they are 'telling things the way they are' (Runyan and Peterson, 1991, p. 70). It may be
explain, order and systematise . . . theory . . . always remains distinct from that world' (George, 1993, p. 209).

becoming somewhat of post-positivist cliche to claim that we are living in a complex world and thus simplistic theories will be of little explanatory or
descriptive use. But if

we are trying to understand more about the world and in particular those
events which cause pain and destruction, why would anyone not want to include
insights which might help us do that? If realist scholars want genuinely to investigate
the causes of war in a sophisticated and systematic manner, why not investigate the
construction and internalization of certain images of masculinity in military ideology?
If they want to argue that students be better equipped, intellectually and conceptually,
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to understand international politics, why not extend their analyses to include concepts
of identity? There may, of course, be ideological resistance to thinking about these
issues. The assumption is made that sexual identity or gender identity can have nothing to do with the causation and enactment of war. But
although these are just assumptions they do a great deal of work in defining what is and is not relevant to consider. When this ideological
commitment is linked with a limited epistemological understanding of the construction
of reality, it becomes easy for scholars within international relations to think that such
things as the politics of identity can have no real importance to our understanding of
the international system. Additionally, it implies a lot more work in the sense that more
books have to be read (ones that many realist scholars might think irrelevant), new methodological tools have to
be learned and old positions have to be rethought. iCKal Holsti (1993) is one who laments the increasing theoretical
expansion of the discipline of international relations. This expansion, he argues, is not necessarily evidence of progress. Unless we can
agree on, at least, the purposes of the theoretical enterprise and on what some of the
fundamental problems in the real world are, the 'menu [of international relations
theory] threatens to become tasteless for all but the few that inhabit the rarefied
sanctuaries of the Universities' (p. 408). Why should this be the case? If, as Holsti suggests, our 'consumers' are students and
policy-makers and what they want most of all is to know 'what is going on in the real world' (p. 407), it seems to make eminent sense to find out more
about how that 'real world' works by asking more, deeper and searching questions. What apparently seems to be 'staring us in the face' (p. 407) in the
world may well be an example of what psychologists call a perceptual illusion. In these illusions what stares one person in the face cannot be seen at all
by another person. The same can be true when we move from a psychologist's drawing to the 'reality' of politics on a global scale. The simple questions
'Who am I?' and 'Who defines who I am?' might be as revolutionary for the discipline of international relations as that of the little boy who questioned
not the magnifi- _ cence of the Emperor's clothes, but whether he had any at a l l ! ^ 3 ** In a global age, one

characterized by a
global menu, global music and global time, the resurgence of claims to identity might
be seen as a response to a fear of disappearing into bland sameness. We can drink
Coke, eat sushi and watch Neighbours and be in practically any country in the world. The
fight for identity may, at one level, be an example of resistance to such an image of global uni-identity. Alternatively, the struggle for
identity may be a reaffirmation of belonging, in a postmodern, post-local age. This
desire may be fuelled by nostalgia, a nostalgia for 'tradition', which might be construed
as a nostalgia for the nation-state, the icon of modernity. Identities in this view may be
increasingly fluid and multiply at ever more rapid rates as we approach the twentyfirst
century. But those properties do not make them analytically irrelevant to the international relations analyst. Who we are, how we are, who defines
us, how international processes and events are moulded and manipulated by identities: these are all questions relevant to international politics.

Anyone trying to make sense of international political trends in the near future who
treats these maddeningly complex and infuriatingly dynamic identities as a mere
mosquito to be swatted away risks being surprised.

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A/T Falsification Good

Scientific positivism and falsification fails to explain human behavior
Pollins 07
[political science professor, 7Associate Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University and a Research Fellow at the Mershon Center (Brian
M., 2007, Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations, ch. 4, p. 89-91, )]
The Circle had a profound effect on the social sciences, culminating with the 1960s behavioral revolution that reshaped the fields of psychology,
sociology, and political scienceespecially in the United States. Ironically, just as the influence of logical positivism on the physical as well as the social
sciences was reaching its zenith, its very foundations were being called into question by philosophers of science. Karl Popper showed that the verification
principle suffered fatally from Humes Problem of Induction and therefore could never serve as the arbiter of a theorys truth or falsity. He substituted his
own principle of falsification in its stead, and most members of the Circle accepted this without difficulty (Edmonds and Eidinow 2001: p. 171). Further

the falsificationism that now

substituted for the verification principle in the minds of many followers of the Vienna Circle presumes a logical distinction
between theory (the knowledge claim) and observation (the act of testing the theory). Carl Hempel, to name one, famously
argued that no such distinction existsobservation presumes theoretically derived
frameworks and categories, hence our tests cannot be independent from our theorie s.3
Similarly, logical problems with critical experiments were found .4 There are very good
reasons why we do not allow one contradictory observation to destroy a theory. But if
we tolerate such anomalies (and all sciences do), what can verification and falsification
mean?
challenges to logical positivism gained significant ground. The attack came on multiple fronts. For one,

The unity of science was also being rightly questioned. Allow me to illustrate: In a number of fields from evolutionary biology to human history the role
of contingency is central, while in others such as physics it is largely irrelevant.5 And where contingency matters, universal or covering laws are
obviated. Where contingency matters, our explanations for particular eventssuch as the appearance of homo sapiens on the evolutionary time line, or
the ascent of Caesar Augustus to the imperial thronewill emphasize path dependence and invite the exploration of counterfactual conditions. Indeed,
the exploration of counterfactuals, whether by thought exercise or more formally via gaming and simulation, is itself a type of evidence important to
sciences that explore contingent events (Lebow and Tetlock 2001).
In addition to its often contingent nature, human

behavior, unlike that of physical objects, is often purposive and selfconscious. This goal orientation in humans, inter alia, means that regularities in behavior
stable patterns that may appear to some to be lawsmay change as human goals and
strategies evolve, perhaps even as a result of rising consciousness of the existing
pattern itself. The key point is that our capacity to adapt our behavior to new circumstances ensures that we are
not subject to laws in the way that physical objects are . Any regularities we find will be bounded in space and
timeutterly the opposite condition from that studied by our colleagues in physics departments. Thus, due to the contingent and bounded nature of any
patterns we find in social phenomena and human tendencies, the methods of social scientists must be more flexible and our ways of understanding our
world more pluralistic than the physical sciences.

The
doctrine of falsificationism that developed from the verification principle was shown to have severe
shortcomingsPopper himself made a point of distinguishing his position from the naive falsificationism of the logical positivists in his later
work. The search for immutable laws of nature , whether in Carnaps purely deductive-nomological form or Hempels
inductive-probabilistic statements, was found to suffer from the same difficulties in proving causation
that have been shown to be just as reliant on the psychologic of Kants constant conjunction.6 Thus, the notion of science as a
quest for universal laws, independently tested by observation, was shown to be deeply
problematic even for the physical sciences.7 Finally, the mutability, historicity, and boundedness of human behavior, the
contingencies that can deflect the human story down countless different paths at any given moment, all create qualitative
differences between our subject matter and many of the physical sciences in ways that
make the search for a unity of science completely futile.
In sum, efforts in philosophy of science over the latter half of the twentieth century established the existence of fatal flaws in logical positivism.

It would be salutary if social scientists would admit that we are all postpositivists now. Logical positivism has come and gone, and it is time for us to
move on. But let us not begin this journey with a misstep. The passing of logical positivism does not logically imply the ascendance of relativism (Laudan
1990). Relativism has its own set of deep limitations and logical conundrums.

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A/T Action Precedes/Outweighs Ontology

Calculative ontology causes endless warfare --- ontological focus is critical to more
effective action
Burke 07
[Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, and author of many books (Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence
and Reason, Truth & Existence, 10:2]
This essay describes firstly the

ontology of the national security state (by way of the political philosophy of Thomas
and secondly the rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry
Kissinger), showing how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and
justification, especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody
and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an 'enframing' image
of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian instruments for use,
control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to
hurt'. The pragmatic problem arises because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects
imagined in strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of
pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror' dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms, the arguments of
Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel)

19

20

Hannah Arendt (that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms that turn against those that wield them')
take on added significance. Neither, however, explored what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment
that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21
What I am trying to describe in this essay is a

complex relation between, and interweaving of,

epistemology and ontology. But it is not my view that these are distinct modes of
knowledge or levels of truth, because in the social field named by security, statecraft
and violence they are made to blur together, continually referring back on each other,
like charges darting between electrodes. Rather they are related systems of knowledge with particular
systemic roles and intensities of claim about truth, political being and political
necessity. Positivistic or scientific claims to epistemological truth supply an air of predictability and reliability to policy and political action,
which in turn support larger ontological claims to national being and purpose, drawing them into a common horizon of certainty that is one of the central
features of past-Cartesian modernity. Here it

may be useful to see ontology as a more totalising and

metaphysical set of claims about truth, and epistemology as more pragmatic and
instrumental; but while a distinction between epistemology (knowledge as technique) and ontology
(knowledge as being) has analytical value, it tends to break down in action.
The epistemology of violence I describe here (strategic science and foreign policy doctrine) claims positivistic
clarity about techniques of military and geopolitical action which use force and coercion to
achieve a desired end, an end that is supplied by the ontological claim to national
existence, security, or order. However in practice, technique quickly passes into ontology. This it does in two ways. First,
instrumental violence is married to an ontology of insecure national existence which itself

admits no questioning. The nation and its identity are known and essential, prior to any conflict, and the resort to violence becomes an equally essential
predicate of its perpetuation. In this way knowledge-as-strategy claims, in a positivistic fashion, to achieve a calculability of effects (power) for an
ultimate purpose (securing being) that it must always assume. Second, strategy

as a technique not merely becomes an

instrument of state power but ontologises itselfin a technological image of 'man' as a
maker and user of things, including other humans, which have no essence or integrity outside their value as objects. In Heidegger's
terms, technology becomes being; epistemology immediately becomes technique,
immediately being. This combination could be seen in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war, whose obvious strategic failure for Israelis
generated fierce attacks on the army and political leadership and forced the resignation of the IDF chief of staff. Yet in its wake neither ontology was
rethought. Consider how a reserve soldier, while on brigade-sized manoeuvres in the Golan Heights in early 2007, was quoted as saying: 'we are ready
for the next war'. Uri Avnery quoted Israeli commentators explaining the rationale for such a war as being to 'eradicate the shame and restore to the
army the "deterrent power" that was lost on the battlefields of that unfortunate war'. In 'Israeli public discourse', he remarked, 'the next war is seen as a
natural phenomenon, like tomorrow's sunrise.' 22

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A/T Positivism Good

Positivism is unscientific and is just a political ploy to justify domination
Lebow 07
[Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political
Science (Richard Ned, 2007, Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations, ch. 1, p. 7, )]
The foundational

claims of logical positivism have been used by social scientists to serve political
were used to justify the behavioral revolution and
its claims for institutional dominance and funding. Today, they defend orthodoxy
against challenge while obscuring relations of power. Science and pluralism and the former is
impossible without the latterdemand that they be jettisoned.
as well as intellectual ends. In the 1950s and 1960s, they

And every act of presencing simultaneously requires an act of concealing, making

objectivity impossible
Winters 06
[BA in philosophy, MA in psychology (Kevin, 28 June 2006, Presencing and Essencing, http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2006/06/presencing-andessencing.html, )]
This is what is needed in our intelligible actions: we

need to gather together disparate beings according to

certain purposes and motivations to make a context wherein they can become
relevantly intelligible. This is Heidegger's "circumspection," or Umsicht ("looking-about"). By being receptive (or, to use another
Heideggerian term, open) to what is needed in each circumstance, including how to presence beings and how to best respond to the
contingencies of the situation as it unfolds, we come to understand beings in their essence . Perhaps the better way to
put it is that we essence (as a verb) beings by bringing (or presencing) them into the proper contexts, which
include various norms, intentions, and motivations, that make them meaningful. It is not that we somehow find essences 'out there
in the world,' but we bring beings into their essence by presencing them in a context. As a final point,
this aptly indicates one of the Heideggerian problems with supposed 'objectivity'--a thing's essence, that which it is, is not found in a
thing-in-itself completely separated from other beings . Rather, a thing's essence is at least partially constituted
by its relations with other beings and intentions. This also requires a being that can presence the disparate
beings and intentions into a context. Furthermore, every presencing simultaneously entails
an excess that is covered over. Thus, every presencing will essentially be incomplete
and cannot fully describe the being in question. This also implies that there is no privileged way to presence beings,
whether it be through science or literature. Hence, objectivity itself becomes problematic, if not
impossible, as it is traditionally understood.

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***ROLE OF THE BALLOT***

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Criticism (A/T Solvency Deficits)

The ballot is a line of flight, a single cry of dissent which echoes all over the world. The
point is to recognize the infinity of the lines and understand an overarching framework
through which these lines become revolutionary. Vote not only because of our
micropolitical, rhizomatic tactic for resistance, but also for the method by which our
tactic allows voting negative to turn the ballot into the criticism. Turns into the line of
flight to create real change. The ballot can adopt and become the criticism with a
negative vote
Holloway 2010
[John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico, Crack Capitalism,
17-20]

Imagine a sheet of ice covering a dark lake of possibility. We scream 'NO' so loud that the ice begins to
crack. What is it that is uncovered? What is that dark liquid that (sometimes, not always) slowly or
quickly bubbles up through the crack? We shall call it dignity. The crack in the ice moves,
unpredictable, sometimes racing, sometimes slowing, sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing, sometimes
freezing over again and disappearing, sometimes reappearing. All around the lake there are people doing the same
thing as we are, screaming 'NO' as loud as they can, creating cracks that move just as
cracks in ice do, unpredictably, spreading, racing to join up with other cracks, some
being frozen over again. The stronger the flow of dignity within them, the greater the
force of the cracks. Serve no more, La Boetie tells us, and we shall at once be free. The break begins with refusal, with No. No, we shall not
tend your sheep, plough your fields, make your car, do your examinations. The truth of the relation of power is
revealed: the powerful depend on the powerless. The lord depends on his serfs, the capitalist depends on the workers
who create his capital. But the real force of the serve no more comes when we do something else instead. Serve no more, and then what? If we just
fold our arms and do nothing at all, we soon face the problem of starvation. The serve
no more, if it does not lead to an other-doing, an alternative activity, can easily become
converted into a negotiation of the terms of servitude. The workers who say 'no' and cross their
arms, or go on strike, are implicitly saying 'no, we shall not carry out this command', or 'we shall not carry on working under these conditions.' This does
not exclude the continuation of servitude (of the relationship of employment) under other conditions. The 'serve no more' becomes a step in the
negotiation of new conditions of servitude. It

is a different matter when the negation becomes a negationand- creation. This is a more serious challenge. The workers say 'no' and they take over the factory . They
declare that they do not need a boss and begin to call for a world without bosses.2 Think of the sad story of Mr Peel, who, Marx tells us ... took with him
to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000 pounds. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him,
besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women and children. Once arrived at his destination, 'Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his
bed or fetch him water from the river.' Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River.
(1867/1965: 766; 1867/1990: 933) What happened was that land was still freely available in Swan River, so that the 3,000 persons of the working class
went off and cultivated their own land. One can imagine the scene as the unhappy Mr. Peel's initial anger, when the workers refused to carry out his
orders, turned to despair when he saw them going off to develop an alternative life free of masters. The availability of land made it possible for them to
convert their refusal into a decisive rupture and to develop an activity quite different from that planned for them by Mr. Peel. Think of the exciting story
of the teachers in Puebla.3 When the government announced in 2008 the creation of a new scheme to improve the quality of education by imposing
greater individualism, stronger competition between students, stricter measurement of the output of teachers, and so on the teachers said 'No, we will
not accept it.' When the government refused to listen, the dissident teachers moved beyond mere refusal and in consultation with thousands of students
and parents, elaborated their own proposal for improving the quality of education by promoting greater. cooperation between students, more emphasis
on critical thinking, preparation for cooperative work not directly subordinate to capital, and began to explore ways of implementing their scheme in
opposition to the state guidelines, by taking control of the schools.4 Here too the initial refusal begins to open towards something else, towards an
educational activity that not only resists but breaks with the logic of capital. In both of these cases, the No is backed by an other-doing. This is the dignity
that can fill the cracks created by the refusal. The

original No is then not a closure, but an opening to a

different activity, the threshold of a counter-world with a different logic and a different
language. The No opens to a time-space in which we try to live as subjects rather than
objects. These are times or spaces in which we assert our capacity to decide for
ourselves what we should do - whether it be chatting with our friends, playing with our children, cultivating the land in a
different way, developing and implementing projects for a critical education. These are times or spaces in which we
take control of our own lives, assume the responsibility of our own humanity. Dignity is the unfolding of the power of No.
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Our refusal confronts us with the opportunity, necessity and responsibility of developing our own capacities. The women and men who left
Mr. Peel in the lurch were confronted with the opportunity and necessity of developing abilities
suppressed by their previous condition of servitude. The teachers who reject the state textbooks are forced to develop another
education. The assumption of responsibility for our own lives is in itself a break with the logic of domination. This does not mean that
everything will turn out to be perfect. The dignity is a breaking, a negating, a moving,
an exploring. We must be careful not to convert it into a positive concept that might
give it a deadening fixity. The women and men who deserted Mr. Peel may well have turned into
small landholders who defended their property against all newcomers. The teachers who take their schools to create a
critical education may possibly reproduce authoritarian practices as bad as those which they are rejecting. It is the moving that is
important, the moving against-and-beyond: the negating and creating of those who
abandoned Mr. Peel, more than the new spaces that they created; the taking of the schools by the teachers, more than
the schools that they have taken. It is the assuming of our own responsibility that is important,
though the results may well be contradictory .6 Dignity, the movement of negating-andcreating, of taking control of our own lives, is not a simple matter: it is, we said, a dark liquid bubbling up from a lake of
possibility. To give a positive solidity to what can only be a moving of refusing and creating
and exploring can easily lead to disillusion. A pro-Zapatista collective, or a social centre, or a group
of piqueteros ends in conflict and disarray and we conclude that it was all an illusion, instead of seeing that
such dignities are inevitably contradictory and experimental. The cracks are always questions,
not answers. It is important not to romanticise the cracks, or give them a positive force that they do
not possess. And yet, this is where we start: from the cracks, the fissures, the rents, the
spaces of rebellious negation-and-creation. We start from the particular, not from the totality.
We start from the world of misfitting, from the multiplicity of particular rebellions,
dignities, cracks, not from the great unified Struggle that simply does not exist, nor
from the system of domination. We start from being angry and lost and trying to create something else, because that is where we
live, that is where we are. Perhaps it is a strange place to start, but we are looking for a strange thing. We are looking for hope in a dark night. 7 We
are trying to theorise hope-against-hope. This is surely the only subject matter of
theory that is left.

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Best Mode of Being

The role of the ballot is to endorse the best mode of being questions of ontology must
come first.
a) Its a prior questions The affirmative ontology continues to justify the use of
violence, nuclear weapons, and imperial policies- they reduce life to a resource that
undermines our Being and connection with others in the pursuit of perfection.
Refusing to question this ontology perpetuates the supposed necessity of doing the
plan.
b) Impact coherence They have to win that their ontology is good otherwise any risk
that they are bad makes questioning the ontology preferable to enacting the plan- even
if the plan can solve the immediate impacts, no justification of their ontology
guarantees impact replication and justifies extermination of standing reserves
c) Ontology shapes our responses to ethics and politicsits interrogation demands
prioritization
Dillon 99
(Michael, Prof of Politics @ University of Lancaster, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, p. 98)
In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or

ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one
way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of
philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking,
but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is
instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of
the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mock innocent political slaves
who claim only to be technocrats of decision making.
acknowledge it, the

d) Its relevant to debate specific topic opinions and advocacy statements arent
durable or meaningful when its all said and done, but our approach to life, the way we
find meaning, and the way relate to each other stays with us is portable after we leave
debate.
e) They have to beat the K to win framework If we win an impact to ontology and the
aff excludes an investigation of it, then the K is a DA to policy only frameworks.

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Prove Ontology
Our interpretation is that the ballot is a choice between two intellectual optionsthe
affirmative must prove their intellectual strategy does not rely on a problematic or
flawed ontology before you evaluate their impacts.
1. Challenging fundamental assumptions about the way we conduct politics is necessary
for awareness of the motives behind political actionwhich is essential for any effective
solution. The way we know shapes the way we actour understanding of being shapes
possibilities and has profound future consequences.
2. The Question of Ontology Subsumes All OthersResolving the Ontological Question
of the Kritik Comes Before Whether or not the Affirmative is a Good Idea.
Dillon 99
(Michael Dillon, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 1999 pg. 145-147)
I take the

defining feature of contemporary continental thought to be the return of the

ontological. The return of the ontological has been developed in terms of a critical genealogy of political problematisations consequent upon a
fundamental reappraisal of the basic categories of philosophical modernity. Specifically, the modern understanding of
narrative, order and justice, value, identity, and continuity, together with an aspiration to a
rigorously methodological access to truth and totality, secured always from the perspective of
the cogito (without asking about the sum), were all disrupted by the ontological turn. It
was precisely because the ontological turn did devastatingly target the sum that the putatively secure ground of the cogito was radically unsecured.
Because you cannot say anything about anything, that is, without always already having made assumptions about the isas such, however, the return of
the ontological has even wider ramifications than that of genealogy. For

any thought, including, therefore, that of

Justice, always already carries some interpretation of what it means to be, and of how
one is as a being in being. To call these fundaments into question is to gain profound critical
purchase upon the thought that underpins the thought and practices of distributive justice itself . We are
at the level of those fundamental desires and fears which confine the imagination and breed the cruelties upon which it relies in order to deflect whatever
appears to threaten or disturb its various drives for metaphysical security.12 Politics

and philosophy have always been

wedded since their first inception in the polis. The return of the ontological was therefore prompted by the twin political and

philosophical crises that assailed European civilisation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Hence the crisis of
(inter)national politics (to which E. H. Carr, for example, responded) was as much a crisis of thought as the crisis of thought, as expressed in debates
about Empiricism, Scientism, Positivism, and Historicism at that time, was a crisis of politics. For what was at issue was a thinking way of life
complexly diverse and radically plural in its compositionthat had hit the buffers in terms of the elevated universal expectations of reason and justice
which its thought and politics had promised. Historicisms failure to meet the challenges of Empiricism, Positivism, and Scientism nonetheless served to
expose the crisis of political modernity itself: bureaucratisation, rationalisation, global industrialisation, technologisation, the advent of mass society,
world war and genocide.13 On the one hand, a return to basics was prompted by the ways in which the slaughter of the Great War, the holocaust of the
Second World War, and the subsequent advent of the terminal dangers of the nuclear age undermined the confidence of a European civilisation gone
global. This failure of nerve was enhanced by the impact of its racial and economic imperialism, together with the subsequent experience of
postcolonialism. On the other hand, the

return of the ontological was indebted philosophically , amongst other

Heideggers early attempt to
formulate a fundamental ontology. In neither instance am I claiming that the outcome of the ontological turn has resulted in
influences to Nietzsches overturning of the metaphysical deceits of onto-theology, and to

some new orthodoxy or canon.14 Levinas, for example, through moves too complicated to retrace in this exercise, championed the metaphysical over
against the ontological. Quite the contrary. The

question of ontology has, instead, been split wide open,

and the formulations, desires, institutions, and practices of our established ways of
beingjustice and Justice includedare shown to be suspended in that very opening.
3. Our framework is fairany affirmative should be able to justify the epistemology and
methodology of plan action and advantagesits the same as defending the plans
impacts against a disad. And, the affirmative gets their impacts if they justify their
ontology.

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***IMPACT CALCULUS***

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***Ontology***

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Apriori (1)
Ontological questions must be asked and answered first
Cropsey 87
[History of Political Philosophy 1987 p. 891]
On the surface there is little indication that this project has a practical or political motive. Indeed, the work presents itself only as an attempt to recover
the foundations of science. In this sense it stands within the horizon of phenomenology. A somewhat closer examination, however, reveals a fundamental
continuity of the theoretical and practical. The

question of Being, according to Heidegger, is the source and ground of all

ontologies or orderings of beings and thus of all human understanding. In forgetting this question, man thus forgets
the source of his own knowledge and loses the capacity to question in the most radical way,
which is essential to both real thought and authentic freedom. Without it, man is
reduced to a calculating beast concerned only with preservation and pleasure , a "last man," to
use Nietzsche's terminology, for whom beauty, wisdom, and greatness are mere words. The nihilistic brutality of this last man thus seems to lie behind
Heidegger's concern with the foundations of science.

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Apriori (2)
Evaluate ontology first it precedes knowing
Waterhouse 81
(Roger, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Department of History, Philosophy, and Geography, Missouri Western State University, 1981, A
Heidegger Critique, Pg 241)
Heidegger's central vision in Being and Time is that an

adequate philosophical account of human existence

must treat man as a whole, not merely as a knowing consciousness. There can be no
doubt that this is right. In making this claim Heidegger is advancing a powerful criticism against his philosophical predecessors, and
most immediately against Husserl. Of course, it was not Husserls prime purpose to give a philosophical account of human existence, any more than it
was Descartess or Kants. Like them, Husserl was more concerned about knowledge and truth, and how certainty could be established. But also like
them, he implicitly gave an account of how human beings are, which concentrated centrally on their capacity to discover knowledge. By contrast,
Heidegger says that

mans being-in-the-world precedes the establishment of knowledge; that

knowing is a founded mode of being-in-the-world. This sounds right. Certainly, it is true of the
development of an individual child: at birth he cannot properly be said to know
anything, if knowing is taken in the sense of objective knowledge so hallowed by the
philosophical tradition. In a similar sense it seems true of the historical development of culture. Nobody worried very much about
objective knowledge before Descartes, or at least before the beginnings of the scientic revolution in the latter half of the sixteenth century. And we
have no good reason to suppose that knowledge was considered as, in any sense, a problem until shortly before Socrates. Distinctions between
knowledge, understanding, practical ability, or wisdom, we can suppose to have arisen quite late in our history - and certainly long after homo sapiens

we can concede that human

existence preceded knowing, and knowing was never more one way of being in the
world.
(so-called) began to exist. So in both historical senses, that of the individual and that of culture,

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Being Outweighs Extinction

This Outweighs Extinction
deBeistegui, 97 Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel, Heidegger and the Political, ed. by K. Ansell-Pearson and S.
Critchely, p.71, ASG)JRC
Yet, at this point, everything happens as if our postmodern condition were nothing but the experience of the unlimited acceleration of time, an

in the absolute domination of

space in the form of total and readily available presence. The need of being is no longer
needed. The essential unfolding of presence has withdrawn, and we are left with beings in the form of standing-reserve. As a result,
man is for the first time confronted with the greatest of all dangers, a danger far
greater than that of the total and destructive unleashing of power over the earth, and that is the danger of the threat of the
annihilation of his essence. The essence of man consists in being needed by being. So
long as we do not envisage the destination of man according to his essence, so long as
we do not think of man together with being, but solely with the unrelentless releasing of
beings, nihilism will continue to prevail, both in essence and in actuality. In essence, as the most
acceleration that results in the spatialisation of the planet (and of the universe as a whole), that is,

extreme manifestation of the Seinsvergessenheit; in actuality, as the politics of world domination, which our democracies seem to carry out with
particular effectiveness. Thus, a politics that concerns itself only with man, and not with the essence of man is bound to nihilism as to its most intimate
fate. Does this mean that Heidegger promotes something like a politics of being? No, insofar as politics is always and irreducibly ontic: it concerns mans

There can be no politics of being,

being cannot be the stake of a
political program or will. A politics of being is as meaningless as an ethics of being . Yet
relation to man. Yet this relation is itself made subject to the way in which being claims man.
whether in the sense of a politics inspired by being or with being as its object, because

neither ethics nor politics can be without the prior disclosure of the epochal configuration within which they emerge. In this sense, ethics and politics are
always of being. Both ethics as dwelling and politics as place point to mans necessity to find an abode on this earth and to dwell amongst beings. And if
Heidegger is so weary of ethics and politics, it is precisely insofar as these modes of dwelling no longer satisfy mans essence, no longer provide man with
an abode that is adequate to his essence, in other words, no longer constitute the space of his freedom understood as freedom for his essence (for his
relation to the default of being), but are entirely summoned by the power of machination. Unless we come to think of ethics and of politics as the site of a
conversion toward the essence of being, a site in which man would find his proper place.

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Outweighs Extinction (1)

This Outweighs Extinction
deBeistegui, 97
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel, Heidegger and the Political, ed. by K. Ansell-Pearson and S. Critchely, p.71, ASG)JRC
Yet, at this point, everything happens as if our postmodern condition were nothing but the experience of the unlimited acceleration of time, an

in the absolute domination of

space in the form of total and readily available presence. The need of being is no longer
needed. The essential unfolding of presence has withdrawn, and we are left with beings in the form of standing-reserve. As a result,
man is for the first time confronted with the greatest of all dangers, a danger far
greater than that of the total and destructive unleashing of power over the earth, and that is the danger of the threat of the
annihilation of his essence. The essence of man consists in being needed by being. So
long as we do not envisage the destination of man according to his essence, so long as
we do not think of man together with being, but solely with the unrelentless releasing of
beings, nihilism will continue to prevail, both in essence and in actuality. In essence, as the most
acceleration that results in the spatialisation of the planet (and of the universe as a whole), that is,

extreme manifestation of the Seinsvergessenheit; in actuality, as the politics of world domination, which our democracies seem to carry out with
particular effectiveness. Thus, a politics that concerns itself only with man, and not with the essence of man is bound to nihilism as to its most intimate
fate. Does this mean that Heidegger promotes something like a politics of being? No, insofar as politics is always and irreducibly ontic: it concerns mans

There can be no politics of being,

being cannot be the stake of a
political program or will. A politics of being is as meaningless as an ethics of being . Yet
relation to man. Yet this relation is itself made subject to the way in which being claims man.
whether in the sense of a politics inspired by being or with being as its object, because

neither ethics nor politics can be without the prior disclosure of the epochal configuration within which they emerge. In this sense, ethics and politics are
always of being. Both ethics as dwelling and politics as place point to mans necessity to find an abode on this earth and to dwell amongst beings. And if
Heidegger is so weary of ethics and politics, it is precisely insofar as these modes of dwelling no longer satisfy mans essence, no longer provide man with
an abode that is adequate to his essence, in other words, no longer constitute the space of his freedom understood as freedom for his essence (for his
relation to the default of being), but are entirely summoned by the power of machination. Unless we come to think of ethics and of politics as the site of a
conversion toward the essence of being, a site in which man would find his proper place.

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Outweighs Extinction (2)

Eclipse of being outweighs extinction its better to die than to live as slaves to
technological thought
Rojcewicz 06
(Professor of Philosophy at Point Park University, Executive Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University,
cotranslator of Heideggers work. Richard, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger, page 140-141)

the
threat is not simply to human existence. The prime danger is not that high-tech devices might get out of hand and wreck
Heidegger now launches an extended discussion of the danger inherent in modern technology. It needs to be underlined that for Heidegger

havoc on their creators by way of a radioactive spill or an all-encompassing nuclear holocaust. The danger is not that by disposing of so many disposables
we will defile the planet and make it uninhabitable. For Heidegger the dangerthe prime dangerdoes not lie in technological things but in the essence
of technology. Technological things are indeed dangerous; the rampant exploitation of natural resources is deplorable; the contamination of the
environment is tragic. We need to conserve and to keep hightech things from disposing of us. Yet, for Heidegger, conservation, by itself, is not the
answer. Conservation alone is not radical enough. Conservation is aimed at things, technological things and natural things, but it does not touch the
outlook or basic attitude that is the essence of modern technology, and it is there that the danger lies. It may well be that conservation will succeed and
that technology will solve its own problems by producing things that are safe and nonpolluting; nevertheless, the prime danger, which lies deeper down,
will remain. For the danger is not primarily to the existence of humans but to their essence: "The threat to man does not come in the first instance from
the potentially lethal effects of the machines and devices of technology. The genuine threat has already affected humansin their essence" (FT, 29/28).
In a sense, the threat inherent in modern technology has already been made good. Though we have thus far averted a nuclear disaster, that does not

Humans still exist; they are not yet on the endangered species list. It would of
course be tragic if humans made that list. Yet, for Heidegger, there could be something more tragic, namely
for humans to go on living but to lose their human dignity, which stems from their
essence. Here lies the prime danger, the one posed not by technological things but by the disclosive looking that constitutes the essence of modern
technology. The prime danger is that humans could become (and in fact are already becoming) enslaved to this way of
disclosive looking. Thus what is primarily in danger is human freedom; if humans went on living but allowed
themselves to be turned into slavesthat would be the genuine tragedy. The danger in modern
mean the genuine threat has been obviated.

technology is that humans may fail to see themselves as free followers, fail to see the challenges directed at their freedom by the current guise of Being,

not seeing their freedom, humans will

not protect it. They will let it slip away and will become mere followers , passively imposed on by
modern technology, i.e., slaves to it, mere cogs in the machine. For Heidegger, there is an essential connection between seeing and
freedom. The way out of slavery begins with seeing, insight. But it is the right thing that must be seen, namely, one's own
and fail to see the genuine possibilities open to them to work out their destiny. Then,

condition. The danger is that humans may perfect their powers of scientific seeing and yet be blind to that wherein their dignity and freedom lie, namely

Humans would then pose as "masters of the earth," and yet

their self-blindness would make them slaves.
the entire domain of disclosedness and their role in it.

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Key To Decisions
Ontology comes first its key to all decisionmaking
Dillon 99
(Michael, Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, 1999, Moral Spaces Pg. 97-98)
Heirs to all this, we find ourselves in the turbulent and now globalized wake of its confluence. As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the

the relevance of ontology to all

other kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable . For one cannot say anything about any-thing that is,
deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and the political4-never tired of pointing out,

without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology sequestered

What this ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to

challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review
reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal
ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings
of any mode of thought are rendered problematic . This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it
within it.

does to the question of moder-nity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when
it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its
foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what
kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in

the
fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and
judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a
human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the
ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather
than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietz-sche and Heidegger showed that it
intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political
which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed

decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of

This applies indeed applies most, to those mock -innocent political slaves who claim
only to be technocrats of decision making.
being within it.

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Outweighs Nuclear War (1)

This enframing surrenders our ideals, dreams, and Being for promises of contentment
in a material paradisecreating a hell on eartha fate worse than nuclear
annihilation.
Zimmerman 94
(Michael, Prof of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earth's Future, p.119-120)

Heidegger asserted that human

self assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between
being and human Dasein [German for being]. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous
than a nuclear war that might bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and
the destruction of the earth. This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world
than to lose ones soul by losing ones relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear
war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur
in an ontological clearing through which life could manifest itself. Further, since modernitys one
dimensional disclosure to entities virtually denies that any being at all, the loss of humanitys openness for being is already occurring. Modernitys
background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material happiness for everyone by reducing nature

The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in a nuclear war would be

equivalent to modernitys slow destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would
equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided a nuclear war only to survive as
contended clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological
damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise.
into pure energy.

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Outweighs Nuclear War (2)

Meditative thinking and releasement towards things is crucial to re-ground the essence
of humanitythe preservation of this essence outweighs nuclear conflict
Heidegger 55
[professor and philosopher (Martin, 1955, Discourse on Thinking, part of the book Martin Heidegger: philosophical and political writings, p. 93-5, )]
No single man, no group of men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists, and technicians, no conference of leaders of commerce and
industry, can brake or direct the progress of history in the atomic age. No merely human organization is capable of gaining dominion over it.
Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology? He would be if man today abandons any

once meditative thinking awakens, it

must be at work unceasingly and on every last occasionhence, also, here and now at this commemoration. For
intention to pit meditative thinking decisively against merely calculative thinking. But

here we are considering what is threatened especially in the atomic age: the autochthony of the works of man.Thus we ask now: even if the old
rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which mans nature
and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age?
What could the ground and foundation be for the new autochthony? Perhaps the answer we are looking for lies at hand; so near that we all too easily

This way is the way of

meditative thinking. Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of
overlook it. For the way to what is near is always the longest and thus the hardest for us humans.

ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.Let us give it a trial. For all of us, the
arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater of lesser extend indispensible. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It
would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But

suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that
we fall into bondage to them.
Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time.
We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core.

affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to
dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.

We can

But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation
to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is,
let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology
which expresses yes and at the same time "no," by an old word, releasement toward things.Having this comportment we no longer view things only in a
technical way. It gives us clear vision and we notice that while the production and use of machines demand of us another relation to things, it is not a
meaningless relation. Farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorized food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a
profound change is taking place in man's relation to nature and to the world. But the meaning that reigns in this change remains obscure.There is then in
all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what man does and leaves undone. We do not know the significance of

the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we
explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm
of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of
what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.
Releasement coward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way.
They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by
it.Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new autochthony which someday even might be fit to recapture the old
and now rapidly disappearing autochthony in a changed form.But for the time beingwe do not know for how longman finds himself in a perilous
situation. Why? Just because a third world war might break out unexpectedly and bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction

a far greater danger threatensprecisely when the danger of

a third world war has been removed. A strange assertion! Strange indeed, but only as long as we do not meditate.
of the earth? No. In this dawning atomic age

In what sense is the statement just made valid? This assertion is valid in the sense that the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age

calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted

and practiced as the only way of thinking.What great danger then might move upon us? Then there might go hand in hand
with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness. And then? Then
man would have denied and thrown away his own special naturethat he is a
meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man's essential nature . Therefore, the
could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that

issue is keeping meditative thinking alive.

Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally. Both flourish only through
persistent, courageous thinking.Perhaps today's memorial celebration will prompt us toward this. If we respond to the prompting, we think of Conradin
Kreutzer by thinking of the origin of his work, the life-giving powers of his Heuberg homeland. And it is we who think if we know ourselves here and now
as the men who must find and prepare the way into the atomic age, through it and out of it.If releasement toward things and openness to the mystery
awaken within us, then we should arrive at a path that will lead to a new ground and foundation. In that ground the creativity which produces lasting
works could strike new roots.

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Ontology = Ethics
The path to ethics must be rooted through ontology
Korous 97
(George, Yale Law Graduate, Copeland Winner, Become What You Are , p. 1-3)

Ontological questions assume the importance that they do in Heidegger's thought precisely because they guard against the
possibility of technological nihilism. For Heidegger, technology does not simply refer to technical devices, but also names a particular
mode of thinking, a mode dominated by calculative concerns. As will be discussed in the first section of this paper, technological
thinking threatens to render our understanding of the world solely in terms of manipulable
objects subject to the will and calculation of human agents. This understanding regards the most
efficient means of ordering and controlling the world as the most valuable. In the realm of ethics,
this manifests itself as the raw cost-benefit analysis that is so prevalent in modern-day
decision making. As the preceding passage shows, Heidegger resists articulating a system of ethics in terms of rules and precepts that can be
easily integrated into the larger technological framework that structures one's actions. Does this mean that ethics must be abandoned
because of the perpetual risk that it might collapse into just so much more technological practice? Not necessarily. This need only be the case if one is
tied to ethics [is] understood merely as the application of a set of rules to a given situation so as
to answer the question, "What ought I do?" For Heidegger, more important than this question is the one that asks
"How has my relationship to truth been constituted such that some possibilities are
revealed and others are concealed?" On Heidegger's account, traditional systems of ethics take for
granted what constitutes the "real world" in which actions take place. This so-called real world is hardly an ontological
given. This is not to say that there is no world, or that there is no truth. Rather, Heidegger is making the claim that depending on how one engages the
world certain aspects about that world are revealed and others are concealed. When we act, it is on the basis of what we believe to be true about the
situation on which we are acting. How

we choose to respond to a situation is dependent on what we

understand the situation to be. The question of what the situation is is a question of
ontology. For Heidegger, then, the path to ethics must route itself through ontology.

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Outweighs Ethics
Ethics should not start with the question of what the good is. Our argument isnt that
we should liberate desire from repression or that the law represses desire, its that
there is an underlying structure of fantasy and desire to which the Affirmative is
willingly blind. Our argument is that ethical priority should be given to giving an
account of how desire comes to be and operate in the context of the Aff this opens up
the possibility of virtue, although it does not guarantee it.
Caudill 95
[Caudill, Cardozo Law Review 16 793, 1995]
In briefest terms,the

Seminar is a sustained critique of any ethical theorizing that begins with

an attempt to define the good, or the sovereign or supreme good. n29 For Lacan,the appropriate starting
point for ethical reflection is the desire of the subject , n30 thus his critique of various notions of the good is
constructive. Several times in the Seminar, Lacan refers to the good as a barrier to desire. n31 If that sounds commonplace, insofar as ethics is
often viewed as a corrective to desire, I should confirm that Lacan's view is quite to the contrary . There are
at least four less obvious senses in which the barrier metaphor is employed, and by describing each I hope to highlight one theme of the Seminar of
interest to legal theorists. First,

the notion of the good, whether described in terms of a natural order or in terms of pleasure or
to support ethical reflection that
does not attend to a preliminary or foundational matter: to give an account of desire . n32 Of course,
Lacandoes not say that any old account of desire will do - heis critical of both the view that desire is bad and
must be controlled in the name of law, and the view that desire must be liberated in the
name of pleasure. The first view fails to recognize the mutual bond between desire and law , that is,
the manner in which law makes transgression possible as well as the manner in which
the law of desire is prior to and beyond morality . n33The second view, toward liberation,
fails historically: the more the theory, the more social criticism, and the more duties we
can imagine with which to burden the liberated subject.n34 Freud's pleasure principle, at least, revealed a
system that tends toward deception, toward a hallucinating satisfaction that requires a reality principle to correct and restrain the instincts. n35 The
second sense in which the good is a barrier to desire is in the analytic situation - against the view that
psychoanalysis is a moralizing discourse,Lacan confirms that the analyst does not deliver
virtue, but rather clears pathways and then, perhaps, hopes for virtue . n36 Surely an ethical judgment is in play here,
but the goal is to reveal or to let the subject reveal his or her desire, not to help [*799] the subject
colonize his or her lack with mirages of other happy people, or with his or her "own good," or even
society's good. n37The "cure," if that's the right word,is to know and experience the absolute disarray
into which our desire leads us, to know the human condition. n38 If that sounds pessimistic, Lacan anticipates the
criticism of a gathering of leftist intellectuals. Calling upon the images of the fool and the scoundrel in Elizabethan
happiness or wealth, is a [*798] barrier to theoretical discourse because it functions

drama, Lacan concedes that right-wing intellectuals are scoundrels in their appeal to the reality of the human condition, but he also notes that a
gathering of right-wing intellectuals leads to collective foolery. n39 Leftist

intellectuals, on the other hand, are innocent

fools in their optimism, but gathered together, they trick each other into believing that
progress does not require enormous costs. n40 The third sense given to the good as a barrier to desire is not so different
from the first two senses (that the good is misleading in (1) theoretical and (2) analytical discourse), and it is the third sense that allows the editor to
promise that the Seminar clarifies many of Lacan's key concepts: the good is a signifying construction, and is structured by, rather than giving structure
to, the symbolic order. n41Just

as psychical functions are revealed (after some effort) in symbolic processes,

the desire of the subject is revealed, though never completely, in the subject's relationship with
language. n42 Moral law is an after-effect, a trace or oversimplification, of desire. n43 [*800] The
fourth and final sense in which the good is a barrier to desire is as a description of the
structure or law of the desiring subject. Lacan remarks that the "sphere of the good erects a
strong wall across the path of our desire," and then suggests that the field of ethics is beyond, rather
than exemplified by, that wall. n44
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Ontology precedes ethics because it is the basis of all ethical questionsLevinas
misreads Heidegger and creates a straw person argument by attacking a version of
metaphysics that Heidegger critiques
Zimmerman 94
(Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Michael, Contesting the Earths Future, p.
104).

Claimingthat anthropocentric humanism underestimates humanity, he favored a

"higher humanism" that lets things be, instead of disclosing them as instruments
serving the power-interests of the human subject.28 Like many deep ecologists, he said that the ethics
needed to improve our treatment of nature cannot arise from the metaphysical
framework of humanism, but only from a new ethos, a new way of understanding what
humans and nonhumans are. In this sense, ontology proceeds ethics. This idea has been
criticized by Emmanuel Levinas, who says that ontology forces the Other to conform to the identity posited by the subject, whereas ethics
demands that I conform or accede to the ethical demands of the Other. For Heidegger, ontology meant the study of
humanity's openness for the self-manifesting of things, but at times
Levinas seems to define ontology in a way that corresponds to what Heidegger meant by metaphysics
an anthropocentric, subjectivistic ways of understanding things.

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Outweighs Ethics (Levinas)

Levinas decentering fails- He cant reconstruct Ethics without Ontology. His focus on
the Victim/other merely constructs an Ontology of Suffering
Larochelle 99
[Gilbert Larochelle, Philosophy Today, Summer 99 proquest]
While Levinas only made sporadic reference to the Holocaust in his work, his entire philosophy is admittedly impregnated with the lessons it
teaches. However, my argument consists in demonstrating that he is

not able to reconstruct metaphysics without

ontology, justice without identity, responsibility without subjectivity. Instead of actually decentering all
points of view, Levinas seems rather to displace the final legitimacy of history from the
persecutor to the persecuted, by giving the victim the final right to ontology . Three propositions
can serve here to establish the framework for this reflection: a) reflexivity, as a form of identity, resurfaces in Levinas through the status of the victim in
the Holocaust; b)his

notion of responsibility is defined by the will to adopt the point of view of

the victim and opens onto, in accordance with Judeo-Christian tradition, an ontology of suffering
as a way to salvation; c) that conception of identity and responsibility ends up justifying the
moral superiority of the Jew, victim par excellence, and of his universal model of justice . The
paradox we wish to expose is that the weakness of the victim curiously becomes the instrument
of a will of power in which the Jew takes on the form of the "last man" in history. To demonstrate these assertions, it seems pertinent first to
try to understand, through a rereading of Difficult Freedom, Levinas' offensive against Western philosophy and paganism, then to see how Nazism
became its worst manifestation. Finally, bringing

light onto the victim will serve to unveil Levinasian

ontology and the failure of his decentering effort .

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***Value to Life***

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Outweighs Death
A loss of value to life precedes all other impacts death is preferable to a valueless life
Mitchell 05
[Andrew J. Mitchell, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, "Heidegger and Terrorism," Research in Phenomenology, Volume
35, Number 1, 2005 , pp. 171-217]

Devastation (Verwistung) is the process by which the world becomes a desert (Wfiste), a sandy
expanse that seemingly extends without end, without landmarks or direction, and is devoid of all life.20 If we follow the
dialogue in thinking an ancient Greek notion of "life" as another name for "being," then the lifeless desert is the being-less
desert. The world that becomes a lifeless desert is consequently an unworld from which
being has withdrawn. The older prisoner makes this connection explicit, "The being of an age of devastation would then consist in the
abandonment of being" (GA 77: 213). As we have seen, this is a process that befalls the world, slowly dissolving it of worldliness and rendering it an
"unworld" (cf. GA 7: 88, 92f./EP, 104, 107f., etc.). Yet this unworld is not simply the opposite of world; it remains a world, but a world made desert. The
desert is not the complete absence of world. Such an absence would not be reached by devastation (Verwisiung), but rather by annihilation
(Vernichtung); and for Heidegger, annihilation

is far less of a concern than devastation: "Devastation is more

uncanny than mere annihilation [blofle Vernichtung]. Mere annihilation sweeps aside all things including even
nothingness, while devastation on the contrary orders and spreads everything that
blocks and prevents" (WHD, 11/29-30; tin). Annihilation as a thought of total absence is a thought from metaphysics. It is one with a
thinking of pure presence: pure presence, pure absence, and. purely no contact between them. During another lecture course on H6lderlin, this time in
1942 on the hymn "The Ister," Heidegger claims that annihilation is precisely the agenda of America in regards to the "homeland," which is here equated
with Europe: "We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate [zu vernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland, and
that means: the inception of the Western world. The inceptual is indestructible [unzersto'rbar]" (GA 53: 68/54; tm). America is the agent of technological
devastation, and it operates under the assumptions of presence and absence that it itself is so expert at dissembling. America resolves to annihilate and
condemns itself to fdilure in so doing, for the origin is "indestructible." We could take this a step further and claim that only because the origin cannot be
annihilated is it possible to destroy it. This possibility of destruction is its indestructible character. It can always be further destroyed, but you will never
annihilate it. Americanism names the endeavor or resolution to drive the destruction of the world ever further into the unworld. America is the agent of a
malevolent being. This same reasoning explains why the older man's original conception of evil had to be rethought .

Evil is the
"devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human essence that goes along
with it" (GA 77: 207), he said, but this annihilation is simply too easy, too much of an "Americanism." The human essence is not annihilated in evilwho could care about that? Instead it is destroyed and devastated by evil. Devastation does not annihilate, but brings
about something worse, the unworld. Without limit, the desert of the unworld spreads,
ever worsening and incessantiy urging itself to new expressions of malevolence.
Annihilation would bring respite and, in a perverse sense, relief. There would be nothing left to protect
and guard, nothing left to concern ourselves with-nothing left to terrorize. Devastation is also irreparable; no salvation
can arrive for it. The younger man is able to voice the monstrous conclusion of this thinking of devastation: "Then malevolence, as which
devastation occurs [sich ereignet], would indeed remain a -basic characteristic of being itself" (GA 77: 213, 215; em). The older man agrees, "being would
be in the ground of its essence malevolent" (GA 77: 215). Being is not evil; it is something much worse; being is malevolent.

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***Genocide***

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Genocide = Extinction
Genocide makes extinction inevitable
Campbell 01
[Kenneth J. Campbell, assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, 2001, Genocide and the Global
Village, p. 15-16]
Regardless of where or on how small a scale it begins, the crime of genocide is the complete ideological repudiation of, and a direct murderous assault

Genocide is fundamentally incompatible with, and

destructive of an open, tolerant, democratic, free market international order. As genocide
scholar Herbert Hirsch has explained: The unwillingness of the world community to take action to end
genocide and political massacres is not only immoral but also impractical. [W]ithout some
upon, the prevailing liberal international order.

semblance of stability, commerce, travel, and the international and intranational interchange of goods and information are subjected to severe

Where genocide is permitted to proliferate, the liberal international order

cannot long survive. No group will be safe; every group will wonder when they will be
next. Left unchecked, genocide threatens to destroy whatever security, democracy, and
prosperity exists in the present international system. As Roger Smith notes: Even the most
powerful nationsthose armed with nuclear weaponsmay end up in struggles that
will lead (accidentally, intentionally, insanely) to the ultimate genocide in which they destroy not only
each other, but mankind itself, sewing the fate of the earth forever with a final
genocidal effort. In this sense, genocide is a grave threat to the very fabric of the
international system and must be stopped, even at some risk to lives and treasure. The
disruptions.

preservation and growth of the present liberal international order is a vital interest for all of its membersstates as well as non-stateswhether or not
those members recognize and accept the reality of that objective interest. Nation states, as the principal members of the present international order, are
the only authoritative holders of violent enforcement powers. Non-state actors, though increasing in power relative to states, still do not possess the
military force, or the democratic authority to use military force, which is necessary to stop determined perpetrators of mass murder. Consequently,
nation-states have a special responsibility to prevent, suppress, and punish all malicious assaults on the fundamental integrity of the prevailing
international order.

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Genocide = D-Rule
Genocide is the ultimate evil, which means if we win the genocide impact, you can vote
aff as a sign of genocide prevention
Vetlesen 2000
[Arne Johan Vetlesen, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, July 2000, Journal of Peace Research, Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of
the Bystander, p. 520-522]
Most often, in cases of genocide, for every person directly victimized and killed there will be hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions, who are neither
directly targeted as victims nor directly participating as perpetrators. The

moral issues raised by genocide, taken as the

illegal act par excellance, are not confined to the nexus of agent and victim. Those directly
involved in a given instance of genocide will always form a minority, so to speak. The majority to the event will be formed
by the contemporary bystanders. Such bystanders are individuals; in their private and professional lives, they will
belong to a vast score of groups and collectives, some informal and closely knit, others
formal and detached as far as personal and emotional involvement are concerned . In the
loose sense intended here, every contemporary citizen cognizant of a specific ongoing instance of
genocide, regardless of where in the world, counts as a bystander. Bystanders in this loose sense are

cognizant, through TV, radio, newspapers, and other publicly available sources of information, of ongoing genocide somewhere in the world, but they are
not - by profession or formal appointment involved in it. Theirs is a passive role, that of onlookers, although what starts out as a passive stance may,
upon decision, convert into active engagement in the events at hand. I shall label this category passive bystanders. This group should be distinguished
from bystanders by formal appointment: the latter bystanders have been professionally Engaged as a third party to the interaction between the two
parties directly involved in acts of genocide. The stance of this third party to an ongoing conflict, even one with genocidal implications, is in principle
often seen as one of impartiality and neutrality, typically highlighted by a determined refusal to take sides. This manner of principled non-involvement
is frequently viewed as highly meritorious (Vetlesen, 1998). A case in point would be UN personnel deployed to monitor a ceasefire between warring
parties, or (as was their task in Bosnia) to see to it that the civilians within a UN declared safe area are effectively guaranteed peace and security, as set
down in the mandate to establish such areas. By virtue of their assigned physical presence on the scene and the specific tasks given to them, such (groups
of) bystanders may be referred to as bystanders by assignment. What does it mean to be a contemporary bystander?To begin with, let us consider this
question not from the expected view- point that of the bystander - but from the two viewpoints provided by the parties directly involved in the event.
To put it as simply as possible: From

the viewpoint of an agent of genocide, bystanders are persons

possessing a potential (one needing to be estimated in every concrete case) to halt his ongoing actions. The
perpetrator will fear the bystander to the extent that he [or she] has reason to believe
that the bystander will intervene to halt the action already under way, and thereby frustrate the
perpetrators goal of eliminating the targeted group, that said, we immediately need to differentiate among the different categories of

bystanders introduced above. It is obvious that the more knowledgeable and other wise resourceful the bystander, the more the perpetrator will have
reason to fear that the potential for such resistance will translate into action, meaning a more or less direct intervention by military or other means.
Deemed efficient to reach the objectives of halting the incipient genocide. Of course, one should distinguish between bystanders who remain inactive and
those who become actively engaged. Nonetheless, the point to be stressed is that, in principle, even

the most initially passive

and remote bystander possesses a potential to cease being a mere onlooker to the
events unfolding. Outrage at what comes to pass may prompt the judgement that this
simply must be stopped and translate into action promoting that aim. But is not halting genocide
first and foremost a task, indeed a duty, for the victims themselves? The answer is simple: The sheer fact that genocide is
happening shows that the targeted group has not proved itself able to prevent it. This
being so, responsibility for halting what is now unfolding cannot rest with the victims
alone, it must also be seen to rest with the party not itself affected but which is knowledgeable about -which is more
or less literally witnessing the genocide that is taking place. So whereas for the agent, bystanders represent the
potential of resistance, for the victims they may represent the only source of hope left. In ethical terms, this
is borne out in the notion of responsibility of Immanuel Levinas (1991), according to which
responsibility grows bigger the weaker its addressee. Of course, agents of genocide may be caught more or less in
delicto flagrante. But in the age of television - with CNN being able to film and even interview doers as well as victims on the spot, and broadcast live to
the entire television-watching world (such as was the case in the concentration camp Omarska in Bosnia in August 1992) (see Gutman, 1993)

physical co-presence to the event at hand is almost rendered superfluous. One need not
have been there in order to have known what happened , The same holds for the impact of the day-to-day
reporting From the ground by newspaper journalists of indisputable reputation. In order to be knowledgeable about ongoing genocide, it suffices to
watch the television news or read the front pages of a daily newspaper. But, to be more precise, what exactly does it mean to act? What is to count as an
action? We need to look briefly at the philosophical literature on the notion of action as well as the notion of agent responsibility following from it - in

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order to gel a better grasp of the moral issues involved in being a bystander to genocide, whether passive or active. I never forget', says Paul Ricoeur in
Oneself as Another, 'to speak of humans as acting and suffering, The moral problem', he continues, is grafted onto the recognition of this essential
dissymmetry between the one who acts and the one who undergoes, culminating in the violence of the powerful agent.' To be the 'sufferer' of a given
action in Ricoeur's sense need not be negative; either 'the sufferer appears as the beneficiary of esteem or as the victim of disesteem, depending on
whether the agent proves to be someone who distributes rewards or punishments'. Since there is to every action an agent and a sufferer (in the sense
given), action is interaction, its structure is interpersonal (Ricoeur. 1992:145). But this is not the whole picture. Actions are also omitted, endured,
neglected, and the like; and Ricoeur takes these phenomena to remind us that on the level of interaction, just as on that of subjective understanding,

not acting is still acting: neglecting, forgetting to do something, is also letting things be
done by someone else, sometimes to the point of criminality. (Ricoeur, 1992:157) Ricoeur's systematic objective is to extend the theory
of action from acting to suffering beings; again and again he emphasizes that 'every action has its agents and its patients' (1992; 157). Ricoeur's proposed
extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight articulated, albeit not developed, in the passages quoted is
that not acting is still acting. Brought

to bear on the case of genocide as a reported, on going affair, the

inaction making a difference is the inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The
failure to act when confronted with such action , as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure
which carries a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed.
Knowing, yet still not acting, means-granting acceptance to the action. Such inaction entails letting things be
done by someone else - clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, 'to the point of criminality', to invoke one of the quotes from Ricoeur. In short,

inaction here means complicity; accordingly, it raises the question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive
bystander, by which I mean the bystander who decides to remain inactive

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***Dehumanization***

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Dehumanization Outweighs
Dehumanization outweighs all other impacts
Berube 97
(Berube, David. Professor. English. University of South Carolina. Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side. 1997.
http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm.)
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This
would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able
to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on

the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any
war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality
of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation . For that reason this sickness of the soul might
well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of

it may
never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on
humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual
deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While

losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it.

Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international

genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are
dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has
evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.

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Dehumanization Causes Genocide

Dehumanization controls genocide, slavery and exploitation,
Katz 97
[Katheryn Katz, Professor of Law, 1997 , "The Clonal Child: Procreative Liberty and Asexual Reproduction,"]

throughout human history dominant and oppressive groups have

committed unspeakable wrongs against those viewed as inferior. Once a person (or a people) has been
characterized as sub-human, there appears to have been no limit to the cruelty that was or will be visited upon him.
For example, in almost all wars, hatred towards the enemy was inspired to justify the killing and wounding
by separating the enemy from the human race, by casting them as unworthy of human status. This same
rationalization has supported: genocide, chattel slavery, racial segregation, economic exploitation,
caste and class systems, coerced sterilization of social misfits and undesirables, unprincipled medical experimentation,
the subjugation of women, and the social Darwinists' theory justifying indifference to the poverty
It is undeniable that

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***AUTHOR BLOCKS***

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A/T Heidegger Rejects Tech/Tech Good

Heidegger is not opposed to technology he is opposed to using it calculatively
Housman and Flynn 2011
[Benjamin H. Housman and Thomas R. Flynn Cooling Down Global Warming: Revisiting Sartre and Heidegger on this Modern Day Challenge The
Step Back as a Step Towards Confronting Global April 14, 2011]
Heidegger contrasts this notion of meditative thinking with calculative thinking. He believes calculative thinking pervades society today and has been
largely privileged over meditative thinkingmeditative thinking has lost its place due to an emphasis on calculative thinking. This calculative thinking
should remind us of what Heidegger said earlier on positionality, for they both point to a certain way of ordering, computing, and planning without
reflection and appreciation for the meaning surrounding us. In a sense, then, meditative thinking is defined by what it is notnamely, calculative
thinkingbut also by what it is: a reflective,

contemplative, engaged, and open form of thinking that is

mans essential being. Reviving meditative thinking will not only return us to our essential space, but it will also enable us to both
affirm and deny technologyto dwell in a world with technology rather than as slaves
to it because it allows us to experience the world in a way that Heidegger calls releasement towards things [Die Gelassenheit zu den
Dingen]. Heidegger believes that by assuming this comportment towards technology we will be able
to arrive at its hidden meaning, which remains mysterious and concealed to us. He says, Releasement towards
things and openness to the mysterygrant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in
a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we
can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it (1966, 55).
Releasement towards things, then, refers to a certain mode of dwelling that has been overlooked in our modern age due to the primacy of calculative
thinking. But what exactly is this mode of dwelling and what does Heidegger really mean by the phrase releasement toward things?

And Heideggerian criticism doesn't reject technology outright, it only changes its
essence and our relation to it
Dreyfus 93
(Hubert, Prof of Philosophy @ Cal-Berkeley, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, p.304)
In order to combat modern nihilism Heidegger attempts to point out to us the peculiar and dangerous aspects of our technological understanding of
being. But Heidegger

does not oppose technology. In "The Question Concerning Technology" he hopes to

reveal the essence of technology in a way that "in no way confines us to a stultified compulsion to
push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it ." Indeed,
he promises that "when we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find
ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim " (QCT 25-6; VA 33).
We will need to explain opening, essence, and freeing before we can understand Heidegger here. But already Heidegger's project
should alert us to the fact that he is not announcing one more reactionary rebellion
against technology, although many take him to be doing just that. Nor is he doing what progressive thinkers would like to do: proposing a
way to get technology under control so that it can serve our rationally chosen ends. The difficulty in locating just where Heidegger stands on technology
is no accident. Heidegger has not always been clear about what distinguishes his approach from a romantic reaction to the domination of nature, and
when he does finally arrive at a clear formulation of his own original view, it is so strange that in order to understand it we are tempted to translate it into
conventional platitudes. Thus, Heidegger's ontological concerns are mistakenly assimilated to ecologically minded worries about the devastation of
nature.

And releasement towards things doesnt deny tech, but rather uses it as a supplement
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Heidegger 66

2012-2013

[Excerpt from: Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and
Row, 1966: 44-46. MV]
Let us give it a trial. For

all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent
indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the
devil. We depend on technical devices ; they even challenge us to ever greater advances . But suddenly and
unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into
bondage to them. Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use
also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as
they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the
unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us , and
so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.
But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology
ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and
relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is,
let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this
comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same tirne "no," by
an old word, releasement toward things.

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A/T Heidegger = Nazi

First, No impactthis doesnt validate the 1ac also, not all of our evidence is also not
from Heidegger, its from other scholars who use some of his ideas but clearly
denounce Nazism
Also, cards dont make arguments we make them. We just use the words in evidence to
support OUR arguments. What our authors do in their personal life is irrelevant.
Heidegger's critique of technology deploys an antinaturalistic conception of
humankindthis distinguishes his thought from that of the Nazis
Zimmerman 03
(Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eco-phenomenology : back to the earth itself, p. 84-5)
Elsewhere, Heidegger

wrote: "The earth can show itself only as an object of assault.... Nature appears everywhere ... as the object of
The technological understanding of
being involves a disastrous combination of subjective idealism and naive realism . On
the one hand, modern humankind reduces everything to the status of an object for the
cognizing subject. Swallowing everything up, the modern subject interprets all things in accordance with their value for promoting the
technology."37 Today, all things are "challenged forth" to be interchangeable raw material.

subject's drive for power and security. Eventually, in the fulfillment of the technological age, even the subject-object distinction is overcome insofar as
everything is transformed into interchangeable raw material.38 On

the other hand, having forgotten its essential

openness for the being of beings, modern humankind adheres to a naive realism,
according to which humans are merely one species among others .39 Heidegger's
antinaturalistic conception of humankind had the virtue of allowing him to distinguish
his thought from the racism of National Socialism , even though he supported this movement in hopes that it would
save the West from nihilism. For some environmentalists, however, Heidegger's refusal to conceive of humankind as simply another species imbedded in
the organic "web of life" puts him in the camp of anthropocentric humanism, which conceives of nature primarily instrumentally.40

And Heidegger broke with Nazism and his philosophy rejected it as an extreme
expression of technology and nihilism
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992, )]

Heidegger's political engagement was predicated upon his interpretation of the situation in the West as
technological nihilism, and of National Socialism as a new paradigm that could give our culture a new understanding of
being. But the very same interpretation of the history of being which led Heidegger to
support Hitler in 1933, provided the ground for his decisive break with National Socialism
somewhere between 1935 and 1938. Between 1933 and 1935 Heidegger seems to have thought that following Hitler as a charismatic
leader was the only way to save and focus local and traditional practices in the face of global technology as exemplified by the Soviet Union and the
United States. In 1935 he says in a lecture course:
From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy. ... Situated in the center, our nation incurs
the severest pressure. ... If the great decision regarding Europe is not to bring annihilation, that decision must be made in terms of new spiritual energies
unfolding historically from out of the center.19
But by 1938, in "The Age of the World Picture", Heidegger

sees technology as the problem of the West, and

National Socialism, rather than the USSR and the US, as the most dangerous form of what he calls , in
Nazi terms, "total mobilization " (QCT 137, G 5 97). Heidegger also criticized the belief in a Fhrer as
organizer of a total order as more technological ordering.
[B]eings have entered the way of erring in which the vacuum expands which requires a single order and guarantee of beings. Herein the necessity of
"leadership," that is, the planning calculation ... of the whole of beings, is required. (EOP 105, VA 93)

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After 1938, then, Heidegger thought of National Socialism, not as the answer to technology and
nihilism, but as its most extreme expression.
This gets us to one final question: To what extent was Heidegger's support of National Socialism a personal mistake compounded of conservative
prejudices, personal ambition, and political navet, and to what extent was his engagement dictated by his philosophy? We have seen that Heidegger,
like Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah more recently, holds that we can get over nihilism only by finding some set of shared meaningful concerns that can
give our culture a new focus. Moreover, Heidegger sees no hope of overcoming nihilism if one accepts the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy central to
the Enlightenment. In fact, he sees autonomy as the cause of our dangerous contemporary condition. He counters the Enlightenment with a nontheological version of the Christian message that man cannot be saved by autonomy, maturity, equality, and dignity alone. Heidegger holds that only
some shared meaningful concern that grips us can give our culture a focus and enable us to resist acquiescence to a state that has no higher goal than to
provide material welfare for all. This conviction underlies his dangerous claim that only a god -- a charismatic figure or some other culturally renewing
event -- can save us from nihilism.

And Secret writings support our arguments

Polt 07
[Polt, philosophy professor, 7PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007,
Interpretation, Beyond Struggle and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]

by the outbreak of the

war, Heidegger had developed a point of view that was strongly opposed to official
National Socialism. His postwar claim that he developed a spiritual resistance to Nazism,
particularly in his Nietzsche lectures (GA 16, 402), has often been received with skepticism, but we now have good reason to
believe itor at least, we know that in his secret writings, Heidegger applied his interpretation of Nietzsche to a thorough
And the good news? The private writings now published in the third division of the Gesamtausgabe prove that

denunciation of totalitarian ideology.

What is more, Heideggers intellectual adherence to the party was never total ; if his political
superiors accused him of a private National Socialism during his term as rector (GA 16, 381 = Heidegger 1990, 23), the accusation was correct. Already
in January 1934 Heidegger speaks in the harshest of terms about writer Erwin Kolbenheyers biological interpretation of National Socialism, which was
entirely orthodox and was to serve Kolbenheyer well as he pursued his career as an acclaimed ideologue for the duration of the regime. Against
Kolbenheyer, Heidegger

defends an interpretation of the revolution and its meaning that is

not racial but historical (GA 36/37, 20913; on Kolbenheyer, cf. GA 39, 27). The most candid and significant
statements of Heideggers opposition to Nazi ideas can be found in the texts that he
composed in private, beginning with the Contributions to Philosophy (1936-1938). These writings continue to
rank history over biologya constant theme in Heideggers thoughtbut also turn away from
other typically National Socialist motifs, in particular struggle and power, and move in the direction of play and letting-be
(Gelassenheit). There should be no doubt that Heidegger emphatically rejects Nazi ideology in
these texts; but does he reach an insightful and appropriate judgment about the politics of the times? We will characterize the general evolution
of Heideggers thoughts and attitudes in the fifteen years following Being and Time before we look more closely at the private writings of 1936-1941, and
then consider how we should judge what we may call Heideggers secret resistance to Nazism.

And thats part of why Heideggers Nazism does not implicate his philosophy
Malpas 06
[Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania (Jeff, 2006, MIT Press, Heideggers Topology, p. 20-21, )]
It is notable that neither Harvey nor Massey, nor even Leach, pays much detailed attention to Heidegger's texts as such. 54 Indeed, one of the intriguing
features of these comments is that they seem to be directed at a Heideggerian position-one that gives explicit emphasis to ideas of place and also

the
addresses from the early 1930s in which Heidegger seems to align himself with elements or
Nazi ideology combine the vocabulary of Being and Time with ideas and images also
present in Nazi rhetoric, including notions of "Volk" and of "Biul'uncl Boden," but they do not deploy any
developed notions of place or dwelling as such (and the distinction is an important one, both within Heidegger's own
"dwelling"- that only becomes evident in Heidegger's thinking in the period after 1935, and most clearly not until after 1947. Thus

thinking and within thought, politics, and culture more generally). Talk of "Blut and Boden" seems to feature in Heidegger's vocabulary in only a few
places,>' and although the notion of" Volk'' does have a greater persistence and signitkance,'6 it too is almost entirely absent from Heidegger's postwar
thought. Significantly, it is in his engagement with Holderlin, immediately after his resignation of the rectorate, in 1934- 1935, that ideas of place and

the
influence of Heidegger on contemporary thinking about place does not stem from the
dwelling begin to emerge more explicitly (though still in a relatively undeveloped form) as a focus for Heidegger's thinking. Moreover,

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work or the 1920s and early 1930s, but rather from that of the middle to late 1930s and,
especially, of the period from 1945 onwards, particularly essays such as "Building Dwelling Thinking."" In this respect,
the strategy that appears in Harvey, Massey, and Leach seems to be one that attempts to discredit ideas explicit in the later thinking largely on the basis
of the political engagement apparently present in the earlier. 58
If there is an argument that seems to underpin the criticisms of Harvey, Massey, and Leach, among others, it would seem to be that notions of place and

Yet there seems very little in the way

of any general argument that is advanced to support this claim. Certainly an
exclusionary politics presupposes the idea of that from which "others" are excluded,
but this does not establish that place is an intrinsically exclusionary or reactionary idea ,
dwelling are politically reactionary because they are somehow intrinsically exclusionary.

only that it may be employed to reactionary or exclusionary ends-and this would seem to be true of just about any important concept one may care to
name. Yet although there is certainly much with which one could take issue in the passages from which I have quoted above, both in terms of their
reading of Heidegger and of the "politics" of place,' my aim in quo ting from these writers is not to initiate a sustained critique of their work as such, so
much as simply to demonstrate the way in which, particularly in relation to Heidegger's thought, place has indeed emerged as politically problematic.
Heidegger's entanglement with Nazism has thus provided a powerful base, irrespective of the actual strength of the arguments advanced,60 from which
to inveigh against place-oriented modes of thinking. Yet having established that place does present a prima facie "problem" in this respect, it is worth
attending, in more general terms, to the connections that might be at issue here, as well as to the possible connections that might exist, both in Heidegger
and more broadly, between ideas of place and reactionary, perhaps even totalitarian, forms of politics.

And Heideggers Nazism shouldnt implicate the alternatives solvency

Lewis 07
[Philosophy, University of Sussex (Michael, 2007, IJS Vol 1.4 iek and Heidegger, Reply to iek,
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/89/150]
iek criticises those who dismiss Heideggers thought for its supposed complicity with politics, since in this way they can miss those actualised elements
of it which are actually positive, its good questions about the basic tenets of modernity, which include its notions of humanism, democracy and
progress. They endorse Heidegger with an ambiguous conditional (Conversations with iek:28), as if they want him stripped of his inconveniently
strident (anti-democratic, illiberal) elements. But for iek these are what should be retained and indeed exacerbated, this is the best of Heidegger 1, but it

Heidegger understood later to renounce all politics,

including Nazism, in his later work, reduces him to a mere humanitarian: in other words, to Hannah Arendt, whom iek
is still not radical enough. Heidegger without Nazism, or

identifies as the first liberal Heideggerian (19, italicised). Elsewhere, iek has identified one of the three dogmas of contemporary thought as
everything Hannah Arendt says is right! Somewhat akin to Derridas Of Spirit, which does not allow itself the simple condemnation of Nazism as if with
a clean conscience, as if an opposition would not operate on the same terrain or in the same terms as that which it opposed, iek implies that if one

one cannot
simply repudiate Nazism on humanitarian grounds, and thus oppose it abstractly in
this way. And to oppose it on democratic grounds would miss the point too, which is precisely to find an alternative
to technological democracy. In many ways, one might read ieks whole piece as an attempt to find the correct way in which to
accepts the Heideggerian critique of humanism (or the human, perhaps the individual atomistic subject as subject of human rights)

determine where Nazism went wrong. And when one is attempting, as Heidegger was, to find an alternative to humanism (in the metaphysical sense)
and democracy, this is not at all easy. Indeed, by 1969, it is clear that even Heidegger himself, among the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, still
had not found another way out. This struggle to exit in his wake might be said to characterise the entire trajectory of ieks thought. For iek ,

the
failure of Nazism as an application of Heideggerianism does indeed mean that one
should renounce ontological politics, which is to say one that would be adequate to the current sending of being, and thus

one that would be able to bring about by sheer force of will a new sending, a new relation between man and the whole of beings. Staging an encounter
between global technology and modern humanity was what constituted the inner truth and greatness of Nazism for Heidegger which is to say its
ontological import (cf. Introduction to Metaphysics:213/152). This would be grand politics, capable of changing the face of the globe, the very way in
which beings appeared to man, as technological energy resource.
ieks politics
iek believes his own vision of politics to remain true to one element of Heideggers thought of which here at least he believes Heidegger to have
fallen short. It follows from ieks own elaboration of the ontological difference which here he believes eludes Heidegger, but which elsewhere iek
himself attributes to Heidegger. First let us determine the nature of this politics, and then the nature of ieks understanding of the ontological
difference.
iek see politics as spanning the ontico-ontological divide, by acting among beings in a way that opens up space for a radically new revelation of the
same, an event in being-history, a new event of being. Later iek speaks of a trauma as an ontic occurrence which necessitates an entirely new
understanding of the whole of beings, a new set of ontological coordinates (23). It is as if ontic politics would seek out the trauma, the real which the
current system has disavowed in order to constitute itself, which is nevertheless present in the symptom, the return (to consciousness) of the repressed.
Elsewhere he speaks of this politics as attacking the current system precisely at the place of its symptomal knot.
We have struggled in the past to define just what kind of politics iek wants in the Ticklish Subject (Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction:10527), and it
seems to us that here iek is more clear. It is one that prises and holds open a space for the new. This was already signalled at the end of For They Know
Not What They Do: here the leftist project was defined as looking out for signs of the new, and always with respect to missed encounters, failures, lost
causes, whose revolutionary potential must be revivified in the name of the future (For They Know Not What They Do:2723). But crucially,

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politics is not ontological in attempting to itself bring about the new . It merely makes clear the
incompleteness or inconsistency of the current regime and thus destroys its ideological appearance of necessity and ahistoricality. Thus it opens up a
history once again and the possibility of the future.
Politics is ontic, but it has the grand ambition of preparing for an ontological event, a fundamental alteration in the way in which the whole is viewed, the
way in which it appears to us, the very scope of the possibilities belonging to contemporary existence. It must focus on the void in the whole, the clearing
as the place in which it might be possible for an alternative to present itself, since it is here that the inconsistency of the current regime cryptically reveals
itself. The true courage of an act is always the courage to accept the in-existence of the big Other, i.e. to attack the existing order at the point of its
symptomal knot (40). This attempt to open up, to reveal to view the contingent suturing of a symbolic world is contingent upon a recognition of the
ontological difference as merely a void in beings as a whole, the inexistence of the big Other, and since Heidegger lacked the former courage we may
attribute this ultimately perhaps to the perceived theoretical deficiency of his understanding of the ontological difference. An act attacks order at the
place of its symptom, the void wherein its incompleteness appears or is.
But this symptomal place of the void in the current order is precisely the place of the thing, which is precisely the topic of Heideggers later work, which
was indeed, in quite a strict sense, the topology of being (Poetry, Language, Thought:12/84), the study of entities for which only the nodes are important
and the rest of the structure can bend and move, as in Lacans knots (Delanda 2002:256). Is there not something stereotypical about ieks reading of

Heidegger is quite clear that it is a preparation, and that the

thinking which it involves is a form of acting . And we believe this preparation to be precisely the opening up of sites for
Green Gelassenheit here,2 as a mere passivity?

such an entity as the thing. Things, by their distinctive setting up of a certain space around them, and their remaining finite and hence always promising
a new void, give us hope of a new world. This thing is precisely what iek means by the trauma, which politics is to attempt to bring to the fore by
pointing up the truth of the symptom, thus demonstrating the fragile keystone of the current political-symbolic edifice. iek believes this kind of politics
to be both licensed by his own radicalisation of the most basic sense of Heideggers ontological difference.3

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A/T Heidegger = Paganism

Paganism isnt bad there have been some conflict resulting from differences in
religious groups before but condemning all as violent and xenophobic is wrongpractices like Wicca arent violent in any way. Defining them as such is another link to
the K- it seeks to control religion under uniform standards and discourages
independent beliefs
Heideggerian concerns for ontology arent paganit doesnt demonstrate a
passionate attachment to territory or locality
Gauthier 04
(David, Phd Candidate in Poly Sci @ Lousiana State, "MARTIN HEIDEGGER, EMMANUEL LEVINAS, AND THE POLITICS OF DWELLING,"
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11052004-163310/unrestricted/Gauthier_dis.pdf)

Heideggers emphasis on place is not pagan . As Derrida puts it, the

solicitation of the site and the land is in no way, it must be emphasized, a passionate
attachment to territory or locality, is in no way a provincialism or particularism. . . . The thinking of Being
thus is not a pagan cult of the site, because the site is never a given proximity but a
promised one. Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics, 145.
49 For his part, Jacques Derrida argues that

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A/T Heidegger = Racist

Heidegger rejects the very concept of race
Polt 07
[PhD from U Chicago, Professor and Chair, Philosophy and Honors Program, at Xavier University (Richard, 2007, Interpretation, Beyond Struggle
and Power: Heideggers Secret Resistence, http://www.interpretationjournal.com/backissues/Vol_35-1.pdf, )]

As we have seen, a key point of difference between Heidegger and mainstream National
Socialists concerned the racial interpretation of the Volk . Heidegger had adopted some of the Blut und Boden
language of the party, claiming, for instance, that it was urgent to draw out the grounding possibilities of the proto-Germanic ethnic essence [des

he increasingly insists on the ambiguity

of the very concept of race (GA 38, 65) and on the need to interpret blood and soil not in
terms of biology, but in terms of historical Dasein. Thus, when he develops the concept of earth in The Origin of
the Work of Art, he does not mean a given, pre-cultural nature that determines an essence,
but a dimension of Dasein that can be revealed only in strife with culture or the
world. The earth can provide meaning and direction only if the world struggles to
reveal it, fails, and learns from this failure (Heidegger 2002, 2627). The earth is not a fixed ground that could
urgermanischen Stammeswesens] and bring them to mastery (GA 36/37, 89). But

determine a world without such creative struggle. To interpret the earth in racial terms is not to struggle with it, but to subject it unthinkingly to a world
in fact, the nineteenth-century English world of liberalism and Darwinism (GA 36/37, 210).

in the absence of critical reflection, neither an individual nor a people can

truly be. To be someone requires asking who one is. This is the case because the being
of Dasein is existencethat is, a way of being for which this being itself is an issue (SZ
We can go farther:

12, 42). As Heidegger had said as early as 1924, if the being of Dasein has this reflexive, self-problematizing character, Then Dasein would mean being
questionable (GA 64, 125).

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A/T Heidegger is Unqualified

Heideggers qualifications are irrelevant
Dreyfus 92
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, "Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism,
Technology, Art and Politics" Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, Ed., Cambridge University Press, 1992, )
Such thinking is far from the "infallible knowledge"20 many think Heidegger claims. Indeed, Heidegger

goes out of his way to

point out that he can claim no infallibility for this interpretation. He writes to a student that "This
thinking can never show credentials such as mathematical knowledge can. But it is just
as little a matter of arbitrariness."21 He then goes on to repeat his reading of the West as having lost touch with the saving
practices excluded by totalizing technology -practices which are nonetheless all around us.

absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence,

which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of
The default of god and the divinities is absence. But

the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. (PLT 184, VA 183)

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A/T Heidegger = Mystic

Heidegger isnt a mystic
Hentoff 92
[Nat Hentoff, civil liberties journalist, FREE SPEECH FOR ME-BUT NOT FOR THEE, 1992, p.xiii.]
Again, Heidegger

is not a "mystic." He does not describe or advocate the experiencing of

any sort of oneness with an absolute or infinite. For him both man and Being are finite, and their relationship never
dissolves in sheer oneness. Hence absolute, infinite, or the One can appear to him only as
abstractions of man's thinking, and not as realities of essential power.

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***Random Blocks***

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A/T Artificial Intelliegence DA

AI fails without a Heideggerian understanding of the world values are only
meaningless facts without considering Being
Dreyfus 07
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, 2007, Philosophical Psychology 20 (2), Why
Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian, )]

AI research program was degenerating. I was particularly

researchers were running up against the problem of
representing significance and relevance a problem that Heidegger saw was implicit in Descartes
understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned what Descartes called values, and John Searle
Using Heidegger as a guide, I began to look for signs that the whole
struck by the fact that, among other troubles,

now calls functions.4

But, Heidegger warned, values are just more meaningless facts. To say a hammer has the function of being for hammering
leaves out the defining relation of hammers to nails and other equipment, to the point of building things, and to the skills required when actually using
the hammer all of which reveal the way of being of the hammer which Heidegger called readiness-to-hand. Merely assigning formal function predicates
to brute facts such as hammers couldnt capture the hammers way of being nor the meaningful organization of the everyday world in which hammering
has its place. [B]y taking refuge in 'value' characteristics, Heidegger said, we are far from even catching a glimpse of being as readiness-to-hand.5

representing a few million facts about objects including their

functions, would solve what had come to be called the commonsense knowledge problem. It seemed to me, however, that the deep
problem wasnt storing millions of facts; it was knowing which facts were relevant in any given
Minsky, unaware of Heideggers critique, was convinced that

situation. One version of this relevance problem was called the frame problem. If the computer is running a representation of the current state of the
world and something in the world changes, how does the program determine which of its represented facts can be assumed to have stayed the same, and
which would have to be updated?
As Michael Wheeler in his recent book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, puts it: [G]iven a dynamically changing world, how is a nonmagical
system ... to take account of those state changes in that world ... that matter, and those unchanged states in that world that matter, while ignoring those
that do not? And how is that system to retrieve and (if necessary) to revise, out of all the beliefs that it possesses, just those beliefs that are relevant in
some particular context of action?6

Truly understanding our particular way of being allows for AI

Dreyfus 07
[professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, PhD from Harvard (Hubert L, 2007, Philosophical Psychology 20 (2), Why
Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian, )]
It would be satisfying if we could now conclude that, with the help of Merleau-Ponty and Walter Freeman, we can fix what is wrong with current
allegedly Heideggerian AI by making it more Heideggerian . There is, however, a big remaining problem. Merleau-Pontys and
Freemans account of how we directly pick up significance and improve our sensitivity to relevance depends on our responding to what is significant for

If we cant make
our brain model responsive to the significance in the environment as it shows up
specifically for human beings, the project of developing an embedded and embodied
Heideggerian AI cant get off the ground. Thus, to program Heideggerian AI, we would
not only need a model of the brain functioning underlying coupled coping such as Freemans; we would also needand heres the rub a
model of our particular way of being embedded and embodied such that what we experience is significant for us in the
particular way that it is. That is, we would have to include in our program a model of a body very
much like ours with our needs, desires, pleasures, pains, ways of moving, cultural
background, etc.
us given our needs, body size, ways of moving, and so forth, not to mention our personal and cultural self-interpretation.

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A/T Totalitarianism DA
Anti-democratic questioning sustains democracy
Lewis 07
[Philosophy, University of Sussex (Michael, 2007, IJS Vol 1.4 iek and Heidegger, Reply to iek,
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/89/150, )]
Lacans theory is a provocation of democracy: anti-democratic, but in a way that supplements democracy in what we can infer is a Derridean sense .

The provocative opposition is necessary to the very maintenance of democracy as such.

Without an anti-democratic goad democracy hardens into totalitarian rule. It can present itself
to itself and understand itself only by reflecting itself in its opposite, an opposite whose existence it must allow in order to
be democratic. This is akin to the first option, except this deconstruction does not propose itself at a politics but rather as a critic of politics
itself, a critic of ideology, the illusion of the natural permanence of the ruling order. This is the traditional Platonic model of the philosopher as opposed
to the rabble of democracy, Socrates as the gadfly to Athenian democracy. On this view, theory remains impotent and presents an ideal which cannot be
realised politically and ultimately bolsters democracy itself. a

democracy needs a permanent influx of antidemocratic self-questioning in order to remain a living democracy (6). Thus the antidemocratic necessity is grounded (8) in the need for more democracy, which is to say
that the place of power be open to ever renewed usurpation and hence criticism of its
current occupant. In this perspective of the relation between theory and practice, theory deconstructs the
appearance of stable meaning, which is to say the apparent completeness of any
symbolic system, lacking any inconsistency or emptiness, while politics pragmatically reasserts such significance. However, iek indicates
that today this relationship has been reversed to the extent that it is politics as ideological supplement to capitalism that threatens meaning.

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A/T Habermas K of Heidegger

Habermass critique of Heidegger is false the alternative can aid the recovery of
praxis
Villa 96
[Professor of Political Theory at Notre Dame (Dana, Arendt and Heidegger, p 229-30]

critique by Habermas and his

followers rapidly degenerates into a fairly crude campaign to place Heideggers thought outside
the boundaries of the Western tradition. Whether willful (early) or nonwillful (later), Heideggers thought
is presented as ineluctably leading to a worship of authority and a celebration of obedience. The problem
with this interpretation is that it so fully hinges upon the binary of voluntarism and
fatalism, evils one supposedly slides into the moment reasons power to comprehensively adjudicate competing ends, or the subjects power to act
As with the devaluation of intersubjectivity in Being and Time, what starts out as a plausible and helpful

autonomously, is questioned.127 Thus, while the proponents of communicative rationality employ Arendt to expose a very real blind spot in Heideggers
thought, their

desire to exclude him from any conversation about what postmetaphysical

conceptions of action, freedom, and agency might look like produces a caricature. This , I
suggest, is a function of two factors: first, a reifying, metaphysical interpretation of the
ontological difference, which enables the view that Being is an all-powerful
metasubject; second, a failure to penetrate the surface of Heideggers thought in order
to see how his critique of productionist metaphysics and the technical interpretation
of action might be appropriated precisely to aide in the recovery of praxi s. These themes will be
explored further below, but first I wish to turn to the matter of Arendts own Heidegger critique.

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A/T Etymology Bad

Generic indicts of etymology dont cut it
Winters 06
[BA in philosophy, MA in psychology (Kevin, 28 June 2006, Presencing and Essencing, http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2006/06/presencing-andessencing.html, )]

Heidegger is letting
words do what they do best, namely direct us to beings. Using more traditional terms, words signy a signifier.
If the etymology has some elements that are not captured in our current
understanding, maybe the ancients saw something that we did not that is then reflected
in that terminology. What you need to demonstrate is that Heidegger's phenomenology
itself is faulty.
The issue of Heidegger's relationship to etymology is itself quite interesting. My response to your statement is simply:

Even if etymology can be false, it isnt necessarily in Heideggers case

Winters 06
[BA in philosophy, MA in psychology (Kevin, 28 June 2006, Presencing and Essencing, http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2006/06/presencing-andessencing.html)]
On etymology, I can simply repeat myself: if

the etymology does point to something that has been missed,

then we should follow where it points, yes? What you need to do , then, is show that it is
accidental, that the basic metaphor is faulty , etc. Merely saying that etymology can be a
"grab bag" does not demonstrate that, in this particular case, it is.
If a Rook is a bad example, then let's speak about something else. I'll let you pick and we'll see what comes of it. I fail to see why it is not a relevant
example: surely as a what that we can speak about, a Rook has an essence as much as a horse or stone.
All that you

have done so far is say that Heidegger is going against the majority of
philosophers in history (which is true) and that his use of etymology might be wrong (which is
indeterminate). Now you need to demonstrate it: give a counter-description and we'll see how
well it works.

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A/T Truth Exists

Truth doesnt exist independent of our ontological relationship towards the world
Burke 07
[Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, and author of many books (Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence
and Reason, Truth & Existence, 10:2]
This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based
either on a given sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional, economic or political interests (the
'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern
reason that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid ground of the real itself. In this light, the two
'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments, rhetorics or even
discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together; providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military
forces with organising systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They

are truth-systems of the

most powerful and fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies,
statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and
how it must be maintained as it is. I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement
about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-state), and as a statement
of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at
certainty (in this case, the development and application of strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of
geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the classical idea of ontology as a
speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth , of being, or of some
phenomenon; the desire for a solid metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being
qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising about truth and power, I see ontology as a
particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying
systemic foundation for truth, identity, existence and action ; one that is not essential or timeless, but is
thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual socio-political context of some kind. In short,

ontology is the 'politics of truth' in its most sweeping and powerful form.

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A/T Schmitt/Clausewitz
Schmitt and Clausewitzs ontology causes endless warfare and precludes alternative
solutions to conflicts
Burke 07
[ Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, and author of many books (Anthony, Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence
and Reason, Truth & Existence, 10:2]

Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the
political signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor
pacifism') but

it is hard to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a
social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an ontology can only support, as a kind of originary
ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving
political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political'
conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war . As he says: 'to the enemy
concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'. 37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain
further below, the existential and rationalistic ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support
and justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers. Firstly, the emergence of
conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is
conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence
of the other constitutes an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and
decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and
responsibility from policy and political discourse: our actions can be conceived as
independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry , as necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but
do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain. Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a
Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks -- further encourages the resort to
military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its
resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and
existential in nature; as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant
portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are arguably examples of such
ontologies in action. Secondly, the militaristic force of such an ontology is visible, in Schmitt, in the absolute sense of vulnerability
whereby a people can judge whether their 'adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life'.38 Evoking the kind of thinking that would become
controversial in the Bush doctrine, Hegel similarly argues that:
...a state may regard its infinity and honour as at stake in each of its concerns, however minute, and it is all the more inclined to susceptibility to injury
the more its strong individuality is impelled as a result of long domestic peace to seek and create a sphere of activity abroad. ....the state is in essence
mind and therefore cannot be prepared to stop at just taking notice of an injury after it has actually occurred. On the contrary, there arises in addition as
a cause of strife the idea of such an injury...39 Identity, even more than physical security or autonomy, is

put at stake in such

thinking and can be defended and redeemed through warfare (or, when taken to a further
extreme of an absolute demonisation and dehumanisation of the other, by mass killing, 'ethnic
cleansing' or genocide). However anathema to a classical realist like Morgenthau, for whom prudence was a core political virtue, these have
been influential ways of defining national security and defence during the twentieth century and persists into the twenty-first. They infused Cold
War strategy in the United States (with the key policy document NSC68 stating that 'the Soviet-led assault on free institutions is
worldwide now, and ... a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere')40 and frames dominant Western responses to
the threat posed by Al Qaeda and like groups (as Tony Blair admitted in 2006, 'We could have chosen security as the battleground.
But we didn't. We chose values.')41 It has also become influential, in a particularly tragic and destructive way , in
Israel, where memories of the Holocaust and (all too common) statements by Muslim and Arab leaders rejecting Israel's existence are mobilised by
conservatives to justify military adventurism and a rejectionist policy towards the Palestinians.
On the reverse side of such ontologies of national insecurity we find pride and hubris, the belief that martial preparedness and action are vital or healthy
for the existence of a people. Clausewitz's thought is thoroughly imbued with this conviction. For example, his definition of war as an act of policy does
not refer merely to the policy of cabinets, but expresses the objectives and will ofpeoples:
When whole communities go to war -- whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples -- the reason always lies in some political situation and the
occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy.42

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Such a perspective prefigures Schmitt's definition of the 'political' (an earlier translation
reads 'war, therefore, is a political act'), and thus creates an inherent tension between its
tendency to fuel the escalation of conflict and Clausewitz's declared aim, in defining
war as policy, to prevent war becoming 'a complete , untrammelled, absolute
manifestation of violence'.43 Likewise his argument that war is a 'trinity' of people (the source of
'primordial violence, hatred and enmity'), the military (who manage the 'play of chance and
probability') and government (which achieve war's 'subordination as an instrument of policy, which
makes it subject to reason alone') merges the existential and rationalistic conceptions of war into a
theoretical unity.44

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