Martin+Heidegger

 Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger stands as one of the more important figures in German philosophy in the 20th century as well as a significant contributor to Continental Philosophy in general. Also, Heidegger is one of the few representative continental philosophers in the whole of Philosophy 135 (the other being, of course, Merleau-Ponty). Heidegger tends to use ancient Greek philosophical and linguistic frameworks as a means to understand contemporary relationships and truths.

Unlike some of the other philosophers encountered in this course (i.e. Keekok Lee), Heidegger approaches environmental philosophy not focused on constructing complex systems of value; instead his emphasis is on understanding and describing the ‘truth’ and ‘essence’ of human relationships, in this case, with the rest of nature. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger explores the role and essence of technology, seeking “a free relationship to it” (pg.197) as a means to understand the changing place of man in the context of the rest of nature.

According to Heidegger, technology is not just “a man-made means to an end established by man…” (pg.198). Although it is correct, as he says, to point out that technology serves as a means to and end, in another light, it is an end in it of itself. Modern technology, according to Heidegger, serves the role of a “revealing,” one that he then defines as “a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such…” (pg.203). Here, Heidegger seems to be getting at the idea that going through the motions of existing among technology-and with it-conceals and obscures the true, underlying relationships. Technology, in this case, has fundamentally changed the way in which we interact with and exist in nature. When at one point the environment we lived in merely served the role of providing us with the means by which to exist (as in the case of the wooden bridge that he points out on pg. 204), the development and use of modern technology no longer preserves and maintains that same ‘human-rest of nature’ relationship, consequently establishing and reinforcing a different conception of nature.

(Joseph Homer)

