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Van: owner-heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]Namens Malcolm
Riddoch
Verzonden: maandag 25 oktober 2004 16:38
Aan: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Onderwerp: Re: Energy decline and totalitarianism
On Monday, October 25, 2004, at 07:13 PM, Bakker, R.B.M. de wrote:
> Hydrogen energy, or whatever TECHNOLOGICAL effort to face the
> permanent crisis we're in, CANNOT be a solution, Suppose even,
> that it would work somehow, then the real problem just remains,
> waiting to become acute in what always will be unforseeable
> circumstances.
Many environmentally minded people would agree with you. They feel that
energy alternatives that allow our growth based order to continue will
only postpone the deadline and make the final outcome worse. The main
problem for them is that oil based civilisation has led to massive
overpopulation due to 'phantom carrying capacity'. The latter currently
supports a population of 6.4 billion based solely on our nonrenewable
hydrocarbon energy surplus and without which the earth could possibly
support only about 1-2 billion of us. You factor in the probability of
massive war, famine and pestilence over the next few decades coupled
with catastrophic global warming and then the complete collapse of
civilisation or even extinction becomes a possibility.
I've been arguing that no matter what truly sustainable alternatives
are found we need to understand how we got into this mess in the first
place otherwise humanity will be locked into the same cycle of boom and
bust that has characterised modernity so far, into the eternal
recurrence of the same human reality and its will to power. We need to
understand the mechanism of the will to will and our relation to
technology as the historical setup for modern understanding. But that's
where I lose them as it's too philosophical to actually question one's
own understanding, so here I am back in Heidegger's realm.
> The only 'solution' can be: not working towards solutions anymore.
> They themselves are the trouble. Cos they have their ground in
> (the holding sway of) subjectivity. And any widerwille or rage
> against not being able to bring solutions, will only entangle more
> into subjectivism, at last completely irrational subjectivism.
> (fundamentalism: principle of reason as will-to-will)
The solutions will be sought one way or another, such as the invasion
of Iraq for instance, and I agree the coming energy decline will only
intensify our entanglement in modern subjectivism. People en masse will
be outraged, nihilist confusion will proliferate and some will turn
further to the old gods while others sink into hopelessly skeptical
nihilism as the new gods of liberal morality collapse into chaos and
totalitarian technicism. Perhaps extreme nihilism will step into that
breach on the edge of human extinction and there with the supreme
danger the saving power will grow: An ecstatic nihilism that stands out
into the openness of its own finitude and groundlessness, safeguarding
the open region on the threshold of Heidegger's new great beginning for
thinking. Either that or we fragment into feudal totalitarian states
peopled by technological elites ruling over what's left of the
impoverished masses until something like fusion energy allows the whole
stupid mess of globalisation to start over again.
> And meanwhile letting the world fall apart? Sure, it cannot be saved,
> it is wrong to try to save THIS any longer. Cut the ropes, and stand
> on your own feet, that's postmodern individualism, i suppose: carry
> the cross of metaphysical completion: a destiny.
>
> (then behind the world may come the earth)
Are you a 21st century flagellant Rene? Many anarchists share your
distaste for our modern world
Hi Malcolm,
But i do not have this distaste, why are you all thinking that?
I am subjected to widerwille too.
Au contraire, it offers perhaps chances that could not have been dreamed
of. Everything, again and again, depends on how to take a word like
'world', sthing Jud is involved in too now. The world of the world picture,
where humans fit in like other animals, or the world as the whole that regards
every 'I', but that exposes him at the same time to the nothing.
And technology, as you know well, is either a heap of equipment - as such
surely despicable, or it is Being, that which determines (be-stimmt - already
by its challenging Stimme, to which our language corresponds) us insofar as we
are (ourselves).
This is certainly sthing still to be learned from metaphysics: two-sidednes: beings
and Being, but now differently, cos that difference is merely compulsion now.
I'm more than optimistic about Dasein as possibility, while i am furiously
flagellant of Dasein lying on its back. And without openly fighting it, there's
not a chance for a more humane development. The Heidegger case shows that in that
case one is immediately at risk. While the humanists walk away free, spreading
more disease. But i don't complain, it must be so. Heidegger writes in GA39: What
would a Swabian farm be, without the heap of shit nextdoor?
and are neither surprised by the
possibility that globalisation may collapse nor sorry to see it go.
But already when one criticizes the aftermath of 9/11, one should not
forget all those people in the fire, in the air, and i surely don't.
Myself, I'd rather see some form of internationalism reassert itself to
mitigate the fall in a sort of rearguard rational decline of the
project of modernity with at least the hope of a transition towards the
good once the worst is over sometime later in this century. But this is
all of course still merely speculation, who knows what the future may
hold, perhaps the worst case scenarios won't eventuate and we will all
be treated to a radically revised version of more of the same? The next
decade may give us some better insights into the problem as we enter
what may very well be one of the most interesting times in all of human
history.
That's why one has to start with the world state. Once the world could be
saved from the fatal way it's now going along the doom scenario's that are
part of terror too - why be afraid? - , and once the US will do what Germany
didn't despite Nietzsche: lay down arms, and talk over a new world strategy
with everybody, now friend or enemy, there will no alternative be left, one
will have to cooperate and one will be willing, after the bleeding egocentrism.
If, ten or fifteen years ago, someone would have said to me, that in Australia
lives a philosopher, affirming Heidegger on communism, fascism, and democracy,
i would not have believed it. So, anything is possible now, it seems.
I just feel lately more clearly that one's own Geschick, as far as it is knowable
at all, is related to the completion of metaphysics: WE are the completed
Menschentum, and there's a task in it.
regards
rene
Cheers,
Malcolm
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