Abstract
The post-war development ideal, imagined after the society and economy of the modern West, is valorized as an ahistorical and acultural planetary discourse. The chapter examines how a historical–cultural product like development can take the form of an ahistorical and disengaged narrative, and how subjects of other histories are affected by the neutralized, universal form of development. Ahistorical developmentalism follows the trail of the mainstream ahistorical tendencies of the modern intellectual currents. This mainstream tendency is resisted in the historical thinking of a line of philosophers from Herder to Heidegger and others. Historical thinking has given rise to the possibility to show something like the post-war development narrative in its historical peculiarities rather than in its ahistorical, universal normality. Heidegger’s history of Being—a way of showing the historical uniqueness of the Western understandings of Being in various epochs, leading up to the world-dominating technological understanding of Being as resourceful material in the late modern epoch—can help historicize developmentalism ontologically as the planetary concretion of the technological understanding of Being. Historicizing development can make possible genuine, contextually–historically sensitive and purposive engagement of a historical people with their futures.
You want to know what the philosophers’ idiosyncrasies are? Their lack of historical sense for one thing, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticity. They think that they are showing respect for something when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni (from the standpoint of eternity),—when they turn it into a mummy. For thousands of years, philosophers have been using only mummified concepts; nothing real makes it through their hands alive.
—Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 166–167; my gloss.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Hegel’s own characterization of the subject is: “… absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’. It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind it the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present” (1977: 110–111).
- 3.
My interchangeable use of the terms ‘Dasein’ and ‘human being’ calls for caution. In fact, Dasein is not a characteristic of or a synonym for the human being, but is the designation for ‘where’ the relation between human being and Being happens, and so Dasein is the individual human being as much as the historical people and the understanding of Being that dwells within the clearing provided by her/ him/ them. In all cases of the interchangeable usage, this clarification should be borne in mind. The only justification for this usage is Heidegger’s insistence that the human being alone can provide the openness for Being: “For it is man, open toward Being, who alone lets Being arrive as presence” (PI: 31). The human being is Dasein only in as much as she/he takes issue with Being and is the openness for Being’s presencing. Thanks to Robert Scharff for raising the issue in an email conversation.
- 4.
One way of responding to the ‘Heidegger and relativism’ debate is to say that Heidegger never saw the problem in this light at all. That is, he engaged with questions concerning realism and idealism or relativism and non-relativism only to show that such epistemologically driven questions arise from an inadequate understanding of the ontology of Dasein (BT: 205; see also Scharff 1992). While this recognition is important and primary, I think it is necessary also to ‘face’ the ontological limits of our cognition and knowledge.
- 5.
In Being and Time Heidegger notes that “[p]hilosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry…” (BT: 62). Accordingly, philosophy’s task in relation to the sciences is “ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations” (BT: 31). That is: the task of philosophy in relation to the sciences is to clarify the fundamental ontology or the ontological structures of Dasein which makes possible the ontologies of the various sciences. And so the task of philosophy in relation to the science of history is to clarify “authentically historical entities as regards their historicality” (BT: 31).
- 6.
Heidegger recognizes this in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) too, when he states that his raising of the question of Being itself is misconstrued as another transcendental question “because Being and Time spoke of a ‘transcendental horizon’ (BT: 63). But the ‘transcendental’ meant there does not pertain to subjective consciousness; instead, it is determined by the existential-ecstatic temporality of Being-here” (IM: 19–20; my gloss).
- 7.
Thomson explains the concept of ‘ontotheology’ in considerable detail in the first chapter of Heidegger on Ontotheology. For his discussion on the notion of epoch in Heidegger in the book, see: (2005: 19).
- 8.
Arendt’s assessment here corroborates with my view in the introductory chapter that the notion of the technological understanding of Being in relation to the human will was at the centre of Heidegger’s initial support for and later disenchantment with National Socialism. His later thinking on human agency in relation to the technological epoch, as Arendt thinks, can be seen to partly arise from his own disgraceful encounter with Nazism. Much has been written about Arendt’s postwar reconciliation with Heidegger both disapprovingly (Ettinger 1995) and favourably (Maier-Katkin and Maier-Katkin 2006).
- 9.
Johnson proposes the ‘comparative institutional method’, which is “an inductive methodology that searches for commonalities and connections to broader historical trends and problems while at the same time incorporating divergent and potentially competing views about the nature of history, culture and development” (2009: i).
- 10.
According to Young India of 20 December 1928, Gandhi told a capitalist: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts” (Gandhi 1960, Vol. 38: 243).
- 11.
For Hilary Putnam, “Levinas is universalizing Judaism… in essence, all human beings are Jews” (2002: 34). One of the most recent contributions to this reading of Levinas is the work of Michael Fagenblat (2010). According to Fagenblat, “Levinas’s fundamental move … is to ex-appropriate the Torah of the Jews through a Midrash addressed to anyone responsive to it, which thereby creates a new addressee of the message entrusted to the Jews” (2010: 23). Israel, then, is “the new ethical subject, the one who answers to the call of the other” (Fagenblat 2010: 24). In this attempt, the Talmud, ‘the primordial event in Hebraic spirituality’, is the vehicle by which ancient Judaism travels into modernity, for “if there had been no Talmud, there would have been no Jews today” (Levinas 1990: 175), and this spiritual journey unfolds as ‘an intimacy without reserve’, as a Jewish message that is for the whole humanity, and a Judaic exceptionalism that means not exceptional rights but duties (Levinas 1990: 176). This philosophical reinterpretation of the spiritual tradition of the Talmud means, according to Catherine Chalier, “that despite all its shortcomings in the course of history, carnal Israel … remains … the guarantor precisely of this original and universal responsibility toward the other.… No one can abandon it without failing in his or her human vocation” (2002: 105).
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George, S.K. (2015). Historicizing the Development Narrative. In: Heidegger and Development in the Global South. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 82. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2304-7_2
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