The Metaphysics of Globalization in Heidegger

By referring to Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics in his later philosophy, a fundamental relationship between the tradition of metaphysical thinking and the globalization of the principles of modernity may be considered. Both metaphysics and globalization share the same concept of world, which since the beginnings of modernity is understood as the accessibility of beings in their entirety. The principles of modernity—such as world-accessibility, quantification, energy-funding, accumulation and dominance—are grounded in a metaphysical understanding of the human condition that is characterized by the subject-object division. This metaphysical understanding of the man-world relationship is considered to be the deeper rationale of all essential phenomena of the modern age—such as philosophy, technology, natural science, economy, politics of power, and even humanism—which all tend to globalize their fundamental principles. Investigating the Heideggerian criticisms of metaphysics helps in understanding the deeper meaning of the notion of ‘world’, as this term is used in the discourse about globalization. Globalization and the concept of world Metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance. The will of that planetary dominance is now in turn affecting the center of the West. (Heidegger 1973, p. 90) Here, Heidegger connects the planetary dominance of the western hemisphere (the globalization that originates from within Europe in the context of western imperialism and colonialism, but which became a connected systemic order and, therefore, turns back affecting its center) with a certain ‘way of thinking’—‘metaphysics’—that is meant to be the presupposition and deeper rationale of global modernity.What metaphysics and globalization do have in common is precisely this ‘will to domination’. Metaphysics ‘as philosophy’ is a discourse about what is meta, ‘over’ the physis; the certain beings in the world, and about what is ‘transcendent’ to those beings (Heidegger 1998, p. 93). What goes beyond the certain ‘beings in’ the world was interpreted by the tradition Marco Kleber, Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) OpenAccess. © 2018 Marco Kleber, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492415-027 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 3:15 PM of metaphysical thinking as ‘the world itself ’—the ‘totality’ of all beings. “‘World’ serves, here, as a name for beings in their entirety.” (Heidegger 2002, p. 67) Since its beginnings in ancient philosophy, metaphysics has given thought to this totality called ‘world’, and, by doing so, attempted to subordinate the totality of beings to this thinking, to make it accessible to human thought. Otherwise, metaphysics would not have been able to think about beings in their entirety, and, if so, there would be no metaphysical philosophy at all. It is indeed of necessity to the logic of thought to refer to this entireness, and, therefore, metaphysics became the ‘fate’ of the west. Though, thinking of the world as a whole at first leads to ‘dominating’ it. Thereby, the same problematic reference to the totality of all beings is inherent both to metaphysics and to globalization: the world as a whole is affected by globalization and needs to be made available and connected within the ongoing process of globalization. Metaphysics and globalization do indeed have the same will to domination, because they both share the same concept of ‘world’: as a totality that is accessible to human will and thinking. The notion of world, precisely as this term is used in contemporary discourse about globalization (world society, world market, world trade, world bank, world system, world order, world currency, world war, world fair, world citizenship, worldwide networking and orientation) is actually a metaphysical concept; it originates from the history of metaphysical thinking. The history of the concept of cosmos (κόσμος),mundus and world starts with Pre-Socratic philosophy (like Heraclitus) and can be retraced through the Gospel of John and in Christian philosophy (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) to modern times (Kant) and, from its beginnings, shows certain kinds of ambivalences (Heidegger 1998, pp. 111–121). These ambivalences also concern the globalized principles of modernity. Modernity always tends to totalize the will to make the world accessible: to expand towards all spots of the globe (including the seabed), towards interplanetary space, as well as into the inner cores of atoms and the biological micro-structures of life, and towards all aspects of human society. Phenomena of the age Modern metaphysics, according to Heidegger, is based in the philosophical principle of subjectivity and, therefore, is characterized by radical subject-object division. The fact that man is now philosophically interpreted as a subject (from the Latin subiacere, which means ‘to lie below’) says that he now understands his own existence and reasoning as the instance in which all beings are grounded: 370 Marco Kleber Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 3:15 PM The word names that-which-lies-before, that which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of the subject has, in the first instance, no special relationship to man, and none at all to the I. (Heidegger 2002, p. 66) Therefore, to understand oneself as a subject means to realize a specific relationship to the world of beings: for those, ‘to be’ now means to be an object that may be represented and known by the subject. All beings are (and the world is) now defined by the principle of subjectivity and its corresponding principle of objectification. “Beings as a whole are now taken in such a way that a being is first and only in being insofar as it is set in place by representing-producing [vorstellend-herstellenden] humanity.” (Heidegger 2002, pp. 67–68) Because the world is now defined by its capability of being representable by the subject, and as far as a ‘representation’ is synonymous with a ‘picture’, Heidegger can re-name modernity as The Age of the World Picture, which is the title of his famous essay from 1938 (Heidegger 2002, p. 57). This essence of modernity—that all beings exist as representable objectivity and that the world itself is understood as such a representation—is the ‘ground’ of all so-called ‘essential phenomena’ of the age. That means, with regard to all those basic “phenomena [Erscheinungen], their metaphysical ground must allow itself to be recognized in them” (Heidegger 2002, p. 57). This recognition of the phenomena must be the only argument to justify the assumption of a metaphysical ground of an age, or, of modernity being the age of the world picture.What are, according to Heidegger, these essential phenomena of modernity? Firstly, there is metaphysics itself, as the philosophy of the 17 to up to the 20 century. It is precisely “the guiding thought of modern philosophy” that “something ‘is’ only insofar as a founded cognition has secured it for itself as its object.” (Heidegger 1991, p. 27) This can be found in Heidegger’s Interpretation of Leibniz’s principium rationis – the principle of sufficient reason—that is essential to early-modern philosophy and which says that “Nothing is without reason. The principle now says that every thing counts as existing when and only when it has been securely established as a calculable object for cognition.” (Heidegger 1991, p. 120) To say that everything exists only with reason, and nothing without reason, implies that everything, every being is accessible to human cognition (as the criteria of this being), which can always represent the reason why this being exists. Metaphysics, which, throughout its history, more and more tended to interpret ‘being’ at all as ‘being an object’, is understood by Heidegger as the effect of an ‘erroneous trend’ within western culture, with global modernity as its final manifestation. Its preconditions go back to Parmenides and his famous assessment “that, namely the same, is perceiving as well as being” (Heidegger 1991, p. 73), but this seed sprouted only when it was “in the The Metaphysics of Globalization in Heidegger 371 Unauthenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 3:15 PM metaphysics of Descartes that, for the first time, the being is defined as the abjectness of representation, and truth as the certainty of representation” (Heidegger 2002, p. 66). Heidegger even includes his own philosophy of his earlier writings into his criticism of objectivizing metaphysical thoughts, when he, in 1929, implicitly argues against his first major work Being and Time from 1927. This approach, by mistake, identified the ontological context of object-usage with the phenomena of the world (cp. Heidegger 1998, pp. 121, 370, footnote 52). Secondly: Because of metaphysics defining ‘world’ as the totality of beings, which is ‘accessible’ to human thought, modern technology is the most consistent realization and materialization of the essence of metaphysical thinking (Luckner 2008, pp. 59, 93). What distinguishes ‘modern’ from ‘traditional’ technology—for example, a hydroelectric power plant from a traditional watermill —is that the mill indeed uses the water flow of the river, but that the power plant represents the idea of ‘whole’ nature being an accessible resource for the demand of accumulating energy. Modern technology, like the power plant, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it suppl[ies] energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” (Heidegger 1977, p. 14) Unlike the movement of the mill that is built into the river, energy is—like money—an abstract category that can, in principle, be accumulated infinitely (Luckner 2008, p. 114). ‘Whole’ nature, then, becomes primarily a resource for technology. Thus, m