Siby: Environmental Philosophy

Lecture 6: Notes-1

Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of the Environment

1. HEIDEGGER AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Some of you might have developed a feeling that the environmental philosophy of the twentieth

century is strangely ultra-spiritual and even religious, conservative and pre-modern, that it militates

against the rational scientific temper. Hence, I am nearly compelled to give you a different

perspective – the environmental philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a German and the

best known European philosopher of the twentieth century. Some commentators have interpreted

him as a deep ecologist, but I place his thought before you to judge. He was not particularly

religious, though he had a sense of spiritual closeness to the environment. He has an interesting

critique of technology and technoscience, drawn from Greek sources. He did not accept the story of

rationality and reason handed down by his predecessors; he had genuine questions on the

unchallenged march of reason and modernity. Don’t be shocked – Heidegger was a Nazi for some

time. He defended this by saying that he thought at that time that National Socialism offered the

only solution to the domination of planetary technology, and that he never supported biological

racism. Heidegger is profound, controversial, and very relevant. You are the best judge; here goes

Heidegger.

Heidegger was a philosopher of the phenomenological movement, begun by his predecessor

in Freiburg University, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Phenomenology, or the science of

phenomena (‘what appears to consciousness’ as against noumena or what is there in itself, which

we can never access except as phenomena), is a way of doing philosophy by studying conscious

experience as experienced. In this sense, phenomenology is different from the usual philosophical

method of abstract reasoning and inference. Phenomenology admits that we have no clue as to how

things actually are regardless of human experience of them. Things do exist irrespective of human

experience and probably differently from the way we experience them. But all that philosophy is

concerned with, phenomenologists argue, is how things appear to the subjects of experience.

Phenomenology describes the way of our experience of different things like time, space, other

human beings, other things (nature) etc. Husserl’s slogan for phenomenology was ‘To the things

themselves!’. By this he meant that our search after things in their reality should end with the right

description of our experience of phenomena. The things themselves, as far as we are concerned, are

only the phenomena.

2. BEING-IN-THE-WORLD: ENGAGEMENT AND CARE

Heidegger argued in his magnum opus Being and Time (1927) that we experience things, first of all,

not as pure objects but as elements of our world, entangled within the world. The term ‘world’ for

Heidegger meant the referential context of meaning within which we place things of our experience

and find them meaningful or not meaningful. So, we do not experience anything objectively or non-

contextually in the first instance. For example, Heidegger said, when we hear sounds, we never hear

them as ‘pure sound’ of so many decibels. Rather, we hear them as the singing of a cuckoo,

creaking of a door, gurgling of a stream, the racing by of a motorcycle and so on. We experience

pure sound through a secondary activity called ‘science’, which separates or disentangles the sound

Siby: Environmental Philosophy

Lecture 6: Notes-2

from its world and measures or studies it in terms of a previously agreed upon way of measuring it.

That is, science constructs objectivity or non-contextual experience in terms of previously agreed

upon rules. So objectivity is a human construct in order to make universal experience possible.

But why is it that you experience things first hand in this engaged, worldly manner?

Heidegger answers that it is because fundamentally you are a being-in-the-world, you are engrossed

in a world, you don’t separate yourself from it first hand and look at things objectively. That is not

the natural ‘you’. The natural you is caught up in the world of care. You exist in-the-world not like

water is IN a bottle but something like if you were IN love, lost in thought, completely unaware of

the specificities and technicalities.

The argument certainly goes against the ‘modern scientific culture’ (which privileges the

scientific point of view as the modern religion) but not at all against science per se. The scientific

way is one fundamental way of viewing the world, that is, objectively. But that way is not the most

spontaneous way we experience the world. In matters deeply significant to us, the scientific way

does not work. Hence, Heidegger scholars like Hubert Dreyfus argue also that the research

programme on artificial intelligence might be able to create an intelligent machine, but not a human

being as such, who is in the world. AI assumes that human being is primarily the mind, but

Heidegger’s insights teach us that the human being is primarily not the mind. We can replicate the

human being as a machine only if we can reproduce the human being’s context (world), his/her

body, and the same acculturation process that a human being undergoes. An intelligent machine is a

poor comparison to the understanding of the human person as a ‘being in the world’.

Heidegger argued for the rest of his life that science and technology has considerably

restrained our spontaneous, first hand way of accessing reality, which, he thought, was less violent

and less destructive of nature. Heidegger never wrote anything claiming that he was a philosopher

of the environment. He rather wrote a lot about the environmental crisis as a regular philosopher,

and brought out the environmental issues even before these issues came to public attention in the

1960s.

Now, we experience things directly in their entanglement within our world as the ready-to-

hand or that which is ready for use. Things are experienced objectively or scientifically as the

present-at-hand (in their pure presence and objectivity). It is clear that our experience of objectivity

arises from the fact that we think, analyze and reason. Heidegger complains that modernity and the

scientific culture simply extols this aspect of humanity (human being as the rational animal). But,

for Heidegger, the more direct and primary aspect of the way humans experience things as the

ready-to-hand arises not from thought or reason or reflection, but from a pre-reflective way of

getting lost in that thing, being concerned with it, being engaged with it and forgetting its

objectivity and scientific aspects. This he calls ‘care’. We experience things in this primary way

because we care about them, because things matter to us. When a good driver drives the car, will

she be concerned about where the right wheel is? She forgets the car and loses herself in the act of

driving it. Will a good sitarist be bothered about where the strings are? Modernity is a way of

forgetting this aspect of humanity – our direct experience of things, they way we get lost in them.

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Lecture 6: Notes-3

So the argument is if a thing is to be significant and meaningful to you, you ought to

approach that thing from a caring, mattering, engaging perspective, and not from an objective or

scientific perspective. You may be using it, but use it with care, just like a good violinist is fond his

favourite violin. This argument surely can be extended to nature if it ought to matter for us. For pre-

moderns nature mattered; Heidegger thought that it was not the case for the moderns. Their

approach is one of disentangling, slicing to pieces, analyzing and controlling.

3. TECHNOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING

Heidegger argued that western philosophy from its beginning got fascinated with the universal and

the objective, and undermined the specific and the contextual – things as entangled in the world. In

short, western thought undermined the rich components of immediate experience, which include

emotion, intuition, engagement (getting lost in something) and ecstasy or our ability to be gripped

by an experience. Rather, it privileged rationality and science right from the beginning. The result

was the loss of meaning and care for things. This is how he makes this argument.

For the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, ‘poesis’ (from which we have the word ‘poem’)

meant ‘bringing forth’ or the emergence of everything (the creative force). There were two forms of

poesis: physis and techne. Physis is the natural and spontaneous emergence of reality without any

human assistance like the blooming of a flower or the rising of the sun; techne, for the early Greeks

meant, all human-assisted forms of emergence of reality like the sculptor bringing forth the figure

of a beautiful maiden from a piece of wood or a painting that comes off the brush of a gifted painter.

So, for the early Greeks, techne meant art and craft, and all practical knowledge and skills, as

against episteme or abstract knowledge. Techne for the early Greeks was gentle poetic interfering

with nature to bring forth reality in ways that suit human beings.

How is modern technology different from the Greek conception of it? Heidegger tells

characteristically that the essence of modern technology is nothing technological but as with Greek

technology it is a fundamental way of bringing forth reality and making it appear to our

consciousness. In short, the essence of technology is a way of human understanding of the world.

What then is this particular way of understanding the world? It is a way of looking at everything

outside us as standing there as resource for our machination, manipulation, use and reuse. It is a

way of looking at nature as controllable, framable, and thus reserving it for future use in a

manageable way. Hence, Heidegger calls the essence of modern technology as ‘enframing’ –

reducing the world to a calculable, controllable, manageable frame for the purpose of human

machination.

In this sense, technology precedes science because it is this way of experiencing reality that

first brought forth the theories necessary for reducing reality into a calculable, perfectly

understandable frame.

Is there anything wrong with modern technology? Now, Heidegger is not a Luddite (those

who destroyed technologies in nineteenth century England); he did not believe that we could wish

away technology. It is a way of experiencing reality and is there to stay. It is a fundamental way of

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Lecture 6: Notes-4

being a modern human being. But it has at least two dangers. First, it is fundamentally more violent

that Greek understanding of technology, and thus interferes with nature beyond imaginable limits.

Second, this way of experiencing reality has obstructed our vision, and reduces it to a single way of

looking at reality; in short, technological understanding forbids us from understanding reality in

other ways – say, in the more fundamental way as things mattering to us, as something with which

we are engaged completely, things as intimately meaningful to us, or more clearly, as spiritual or

religious objects, as objects of art and wonder. Technological understanding leads to tunnel vision.

So, with modern technological understanding, we look at the river as the source of hydroelectric

power, the mountain as the stockpile of coal, a beautiful landscape as tourist spot, nature itself as

the storehouse of resources waiting for human exploitation, and the human being itself as the

resource or asset par excellence according to current managerial parlance.

4. THE WAY OUT

Did Heidegger think about ways of freeing ourselves from enframing? Yes, he did. The most

fundamental way this could happen according to him was, what he called, ‘releasement towards

things’, by which he meant letting things be experienced in the way that they manifest to us out of

themselves rather than framing them up in technological understanding. Let things push against us,

surprise us, inspire us, make us wonder, matter to us, and be revealed to us in more creative ways.

The argument is not to abandon technology but to begin to do things to reduce the domination of

technological understanding on all facets of life and intellectual culture. He advocated pluralism in

perspectives with which we look at reality – artistic, religious, political, cultural and the like. Our

intellectual and cultural life today is hostage to technological understanding, and as long as this is

the case, we cannot resolve our environmental crisis. We may come up with further technical steps

like using less plastic, better managing waste, and emitting less carbon into the atmosphere. But

these steps themselves are parts of the technological frame, which we still think is our savior. The

continued failure of discussions in global environmental summits is a case in point.

How do we release nature for experiencing it more originally? By dwelling on the earth and

amidst nature caringly, sparingly, and letting it flourish in its own nature or essence. By letting

nature matter to us. For Heidegger, ‘dwelling’ means dwelling within the fourfold of (i) the earth

[nature as such within which we live and nourish ourselves], (ii) the sky [which stands for all

elements and forces over which we have no control like the rain and the storm, sun and the

tsunami], (iii) the gods [stands not for God as such, but for all inspirational forces that make our life

meaningful, heroes and change agents, special people and events; could also be the personal gods of

religion in as much as they inspire us], and (iv) the mortals [human beings with whom we share our

lives; humans are distinct from other animals, for Heidegger, because they are preoccupied with

their death and finitude – so they are the mortals]. Hence, if we allow ourselves to be entangled in

the fourfold and harmoniously unite the four elements of it into a ‘onefold’, Heidegger thinks, we

can experience nature originally and let it be what it is. In such a way of dwelling on the earth, he

thinks, we can build and construct new things using technology meaningfully rather than enframing

the whole of reality within the technological frame.

Siby: Environmental Philosophy

Lecture 6: Notes-5

I have put across to you Heidegger’s very technical language in philosophical writing

without his own jargon. But I need to make at least one technical aspect of his writings clear to you.

Heidegger’s philosophy is based on a fundamental distinction: the ontological difference. (Ontology

is the study of being/ontos.) Heidegger famously distinguished between two meanings of the word

‘being’. The first is, in the sense of a noun. In this sense everything that exists is a being. What is

not being is not there at all; it does not exist. Traditional philosophy graded beings in a scale

according to their significance: God, humans, animals, plants, and inanimate things. The second is,

in the sense of a verb. In this sense, every being exists; what is meant here is the act of existence of

a being, its ‘to be’ such and such. We can say that the ‘first being’ stands for the existent and the

‘second being’ stands for its way of being. Only the human being is able to worry about its way of

being; and it alone can express in language the way of being of all beings. Technological

understanding is the manifesting of beings to us in their way of being as resources for our

manipulation. As a way of revealing reality in its way of being, technological understanding is

fundamental to the moderns. But the way of being of a thing is a changeable thing over time. For

the ancient Greeks the earth appeared to them as the centre of the cosmos; the scientific view has

changed this view. Similarly, nature appeared to them in its way of being much more significantly

than it appears to us. Nature appeared to the early Indians in a reverential form. Hence, the way of

being of something is also the way we interpret things basing on our contemporary concepts,

language and understanding. These interpretations can change, and things can appear to us in their

way of being rather differently. There is no hard and fast way of fixing things up in one particular

way. Hence, the point is, we can release ourselves from the technological frame, and view reality

differently.

Now, Heidegger, as a phenomenologist, did not think that the intrinsic value of nature is a

property of nature itself, but value is generated anthropogenically in the sense that only humans can

articulate the value of things because only they have the capacity of language. However, he

believed, if we allow reality to meet with us more originally (as they appear to us from themselves

rather than according to our fixed frames of vision), we will be able to experience the intrinsic value

of nature. Moderns cannot experience the intrinsic value of nature because it doesn’t matter to them

and they don’t allow it to appear to them meaningfully. They have no receptivity to things and

nature. They impose their frames upon nature. Though value originates anthropogenically, things

outside us push against us. They are not mute, but expressive in a sense. They are constantly in a

process of manifesting themselves to us more originally than our enframing understanding can take.

Hence, the first step towards a proper environmental ethics is the healing of human consciousness

of technological enframing.

Heidegger liked to live close to his ancestral village, Meskirch, in the Black Forest region of

South Germany. Freiburg, where his university was located, was nearby, and he refused to move to

the more cosmopolitan city of Bon. In fact, he lived, worked and wrote from a hut located amidst

the Black Forest. He considered a secluded life close to nature as the ideal environment for his

philosophical reflection.