Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism

Extract

For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.

–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 51

In this essay, I am hoping—perhaps overoptimistically—to make a problem that I have been wrestling with in ecocriticism for many years “completely disappear.” The “history of the forgetting of Being” proposed by Martin Heidegger, an epochal grand narrative of the fall of Western philosophy from an originary revelation in pre-Socratic Greece, has captured the imaginations and invaded the language of ecophilosophers and ecocritics alike. In previous research, I have presented critical responses to Heidegger that have remained indebted to his language and philosophy. I now think that such immanent criticism fails adequately to confront his mistaken views on ontology, technology, history, and poetry. Referring principally to the texts that have inspired ecophilosophers and critics, I will show that what is distinctive in Heidegger's work after Being and Time (1927) is wrong, and what is persuasive is not distinctive.¹