In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h ap t e r 2 ................................... science, technology and the closure of nature There is then in all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays claim to what man does and leaves undone. We do not know the significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. —Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address” While Heidegger is usually viewed as a severe critic of technology, there is another dimension to his thoughts about it that are expressed in the quote above: by remaining open to what we can learn from the meaning of our technological relations to the world, we learn something of the essential mysteriousness of being. There is no denying that Heidegger is a critic of the technological world, but the denunciations of him as a conservative romantic, regardless of their legitimacy, seem to miss this crucial connection between technology and what Heidegger finds most distinctive of human beings: the ability to question being as such. Engaging with technology brings to the fore humanity’s ability to interpret the world as a world, to engage with beings in diverse ways, and, synthesizing these two, to change the ways we relate to beings by reinterpreting them. The criticism of technology follows from Heidegger’s belief that technology surreptitiously assails our ability to relate science, technology, and the closure of nature 39 in this way to beings by presenting beings as having one definitive meaning and truth. While Latour is much more optimistic regarding the potential impact of technology on our lives, it should be clear from this brief summary that there is a deep resonance between their views. Both resist the non­ humans’ being reduced to their objectness, both want to conceive of different ways of collecting beings, and both are skeptical of there being any one, inherent order to the world that is not mediated by various kinds of relations. In other ways, however, Heidegger is Latour’s philosophical nemesis, with the latter directing numerous attacks against the former, ranging from the in-depth to the inane. While this has led some to believe that Latour is being somewhat disingenuous in his treatment of Heidegger’s thought, I prefer to take Latour at face value, that he believes he and Heidegger have legitimate philosophical differences and that his own views concerning science and technology are to be preferred over Heidegger’s.1 Though we will delve into these views more deeply shortly, we might summarize Latour’s views about Heidegger by saying he finds that Heidegger understands technology in too limited a fashion, which leads him in a distinctly antimodern direction. Though I do agree that there are both dispositional and meaningful conceptual differences between the two thinkers, I am also inclined to agree with Søren Riis that there is more similarity between their views than Latour acknowledges (though not exactly in the way Riis imagines).2 One of these points of connection is Heidegger’s views on nature, which is why we will have to pause briefly in order to take stock of the relationship between Heidegger and Latour as a preliminary step in our analysis of nature.3 My intention here is not to defend a definitive position regarding the ultimate compatibility of their philosophies as a whole, but rather to examine this specific point of connection between them in order to see if there is any room for the intuitions that guide Heidegger’s philosophy in our inchoate sense of what a nonmodern conception of nature is like. The main point of this chapter, however, is to begin the process of constructing a nonmodern conception of nature by laying out Heidegger’s own criticisms of modernity and the role of nature within it. Heidegger, like Latour, was rather devoted to the displacement of the primacy of nature within philosophy. Though Heidegger tends to refer to “earth” when he speaks about the environment and what he takes to be the human project of mastery...

Share