Dr Ullrich Haase - ‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’

Season 6 continues with another keynote presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.

‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’

This year saw the 50th anniversary of The Limits of Growth, the publication by the Club of Rome, which for many was the trigger of the birth of climate activism. The message was that action on global warming now was necessary immediately – but nothing much happened until the Fridays for Future movement, which appeared as if it just occurred to us that there might be a problem. About a decade after the publication of The Limits of Growth, parts of the ecological movement wondered why nothing happened and turned towards the critique of technological rationalism, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to provide an explanation for that inaction and to open the way for a more radical ecological thinking. While the insight that nothing would change as long as ecology would either be swallowed up by the same technological rationalism that caused the crisis, nor by some middle-class Europeans ‘moving off grid’, did give rise to more than a decade of engagement, what in turn has happened to this movement, which claimed that ecology can only be meaningful when joining postmodernism’s turn to language, while also claiming that postmodernism is essentially an ecological thinking? Again, nothing. Instead, all we wonder about today is whether Heidegger was an antisemite or not. In this talk I will reflect on the reasons for which Heidegger’s other thinking has become so unpalatable in our age and why these reasons are the same that should still engage us with the problems of global heating and globalization and the critique of the feverish search for technical solutions to the problem of technology.

Ullrich Haase is Principal Lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on 19th and 20th Century German and French Philosophy, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Blanchot. He served as the editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2005 to 2020.