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I’m continuing to work on my research proposal for my dissertation. Heidegger’s philosophical perspective is a significant part of my thesis, and I have been reading a lot of Heidegger lately. The following passage, from Lovitt’s introduction to The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, really spoke to me:

A destining of Being is never a blind fate that simply compels man from beyond himself. It is, rather, an opening way in which man is called upon to move to bring about that which is taking place. For man to know himself as the one so called upon is for him to be free. For Heidegger freedom is not a matter of man’s willing or not willing particular things. Freedom is man’s opening himself–his submitting himself in attentive awareness–to the summons addressed to him and to the way on which he is already being sent. It is to apprehend and accept the dominion of Being already holding sway, and so to be “taken into a freeing claim.”

…Man himself, through whom the ordering characteristic of Enframing takes place, may even be wholly sucked up into the standing-reserve and may come to exist not as the “openness-for-Being” (Da-sein), but as a merely self-conscious being knowing himself only as an instrument ready for use.

While I don’t have a solid grasp of what Heidegger refers to as Enframing, I understand the passages as speaking to the notion of emergence. In Heidegger’s ontology, the fundamental question he asks is: “What does it mean to be?” This is a fundamentally different question than the one Aristotle asks: “What is?” (in the sense of what “exists”). Our contemporary ontology tends to still work from an Aristotelian frame, where ontology becomes the theory and study of categorization, especially when it comes to computational ontology artifacts. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis places Being within the realm of emergent phenomena, and Man’s being in particular as the ever-evolving state of emergent understanding.

Freedom, then, is the openning of being to that which is emergent and unfolding. It is not volition in the sense of exercising one’s will, for we are always immersed in an experiential world, and being thrown into the world as Dasein (man’s being), we are always emerging into(?) our being as part of the world, not separate from it. When we separate ourselves from the world–objectify it–we lose our being by transforming ourselves into nothing but commodities and tools that exist as objects within that world, albeit self-conscious ones.

Tags:Being, emergence, Heidegger, openness technology Comments are off for this post

Mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium — and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world. It’s an interesting presentation that offers some cool insights and innovative solutions to the climate and energy crises. There’s also some interesting ideas about how ecosystems, and life itself, are dependent upon mycellum. Worth a watch.

Tags:climate crisis, energy, metaphor, mushrooms science Comments are off for this post