pedlt3+Week+5

The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds. (Heidegger 1977, 3-4) The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the will or even with the causality of human willing. Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and lighted up, i.e., of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e., of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees-the mystery-is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of the open consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way. (Heidegger 1977, 25)
 * “Freedom” **

But Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of // poiesis //, lets what presences come forth into appearance. (Heidegger 1977, 27)

But—and that is the irony, or duplicity, of he goings-on of technics as emplacement—there are no secure places. Emplacement itself remains tributary of that movement of unsecuring that it ostensibly seeks to escape or to ignore, ad it is here that the dangerous destiny of technics emerges: the possibility of forgetting entirely the dependence of emplacement upon the //displacement// of a poetical ‘bringing–forth’ that breaks ground and opens up ways.” […] They [technics] set in place, but the fixity of such place-setting turns into a placing of orders that can never stop. The more technics seeks //to place// the subject into safety, the less safe its //places// become. The more it seeks to place its orders, the less orderly are its emplacements. The more representational thinking and acting strive to present their subject matter, the less the subject matters, the more it idealizes itself as pure will, as the will to will. […] Rarely has the complicity between technocracy and voluntarism been as manifest as it is today. (Weber 1996, 73-74)
 * Secure Places / Containment: **


 * Some Questions/Topics for Discussion: **
 * What role has Heidegger’s article had on speculative realism, object oriented ontology, etc. (maybe we can throw in deep ecology, too)? More specifically, it would be interesting to contrast and compare the aims (particularly the politics) of these philosophies with the ‘saving power’ and the notion of ‘freedom’ at work in H.’s article.
 * How do we map H.’s trepidations about the ordering of the world (or the Earth, or both) into ‘standing reserve’ onto other criticisms of modernity’s obsessive tendencies to abstraction, appropriation, rationalism, and equivalence (e.g., iron cage of rationality, disenchantment, commodity fetishism, etc.)? I’m pretty sure that the concealed/revealed is not just Plato’s cave, and that H. is focused on Being, which decenters the subject, but this leads me down a rabbit hole. So is it that there is something ‘concealed’ before something ‘presences,’ or is this a way to get at ‘counterfactuals’ (why this thing and not another)? H. uses the phrase “that which” quite a bit—like ‘that which presences.’ What is “that ‽ ” It’s not ‘man’ [sic.], for sure, and I don’t think it’s a reference to—or empty position that could be filled by—God (although sometimes it sounds that way, and I wonder if the theologians who took him up thought so too). I would greatly appreciate that which would presence the answer for me.