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Saturday, September 3, 2011

Don't Mess with Mr. In-Between Part 2

It's flabbergasting how little Heidegger is “into” the idea of an environment. In fact he is actively hostile to it. We can only conclude that at worst green Heideggerianism tries to cover over what is most essential to Heidegger, by covering over the most starting discoveries he made about being. Discoveries that are indeed essential in an age of ecological emergency. This is not a little ironic.

Consider what Heidegger says in Being and Time about discourse, a basic component of Da-sein. Discourse involves communicating information, sometimes. Heidegger is explicit:

Here the articulation of being-with-one-another understandingly is constituted. It brings out the ‘sharing’ of being attuned together and of the understanding of being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinions and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of another. Mitda-sein is essentially already manifest in attunement-with and understanding-with. Being-with is “explicitly” shared in discourse, that is, it already is, only unshared as something not grasped and appropriated.

If communication is not a case of some kind of packet going from the inside of me to the inside of you, then there can't be an in-between space or medium in which this communication is delivered, without some kind of reification of being.

Rather, communication happens in an intersubjective (I would argue interobjective) configuration space that can't be specified in advance. OOO ecology can't simply be about reinventing the wheel of pregiven concepts such as self, world, and environment.

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1 comment:

  1. AdamSeptember 4, 2011 at 1:50 PM

    Lingis on "The Levels":

    "The environment does not extend in an empty geometrical space whose infinite dimensions are conceived by a formula or intuited a priori. Its levels are not the Euclidean dimensions of space and the linear dimension of time on which Kant and Hegel locate the here-and-now given this. The levels which open a sensible field before our perception are not a framework or the organization according to which things are distributed...The levels of our practicable field, but also those of the unpracticable domains, the landscapes, the visions, the spheres of musicality, the oneiric and the erotic fields, the vistas through which our nomadic vitality wanders, are not suspended in the void nor in the empty immanence in which our representational faculty a priori would extend the pure form of exteriority. They take form in a vital medium, in light, in the air, in warmth, in the tangible density of exteriority, on the ground, in the night, and in the night beyond night" (The Imperative, pp. 26-27).

    Some resonances with what your saying here, I think.

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