Abstract
This chapter dwells on two themes related to the idea of development as good life variously conceived as opposed to the post-war conception of developmentalism understood as the ontic planetary concretion of technological understanding of Being as such. Firstly, it dwells on the notion of the lack of distress in distress as the global entrenchment of technological nihilism continues unabated. The absence of ontological distress is developed in the chapter in relation to the infeasibility of the promise of establishing the developmental society globally, the implausibility of justice for the global south and the improbability of the hope of social emancipation for people everywhere. Secondly, the chapter dwells on Heidegger’s insistence that the still inconceivable power of salvation from global technological nihilism can arise only from the Grecian world. It is argued that this claim can be best understood in terms of the inherent violence of enframing. This chapter stresses the difficulties of succeeding with alternative proposals of development.
Systematic violence and threat of violence at times direct, at other times silent and indirect but no less vicious is being used by the state under the guise of liberalization, privatization and globalization to dispossess millions who live traditionally on a natural resource base, forcing them to abandon rural livelihood based on agriculture, horticulture, fishing, craftsmanship, cottage or small-scale industries. Set adrift to end up in the cities, the dispossessed are now condemned for being poor. The miserable living spaces they manage to create are at perpetual risk of being bulldozed in the name of some ‘illegality’ or ‘encroachment’, defined by the expropriators of their traditional livelihood.
—Amit Bhaduri and Medha Patkar, “The State and Its Stepchildren”, 182.
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Notes
- 1.
We have seen how Levinas challenged this view in Sect. 5.1. For him, ethical encounter disrupts the understanding of Being or world and to that extent does not depend on it. Ethics challenges the reduction of the Other to the self and to her world; rather, it positively lets the Other be in her otherness. For Heidegger, too, I have argued ‘ethics’ can be seen as letting the Other be in her otherness when we consider Being and Time’s discussion of the positive modes of solicitude. For Heidegger, however, the manners of letting the Other be other positively are still dependent on our understanding of Being. They can be termed ethical only if they in fact let the Other be other.
- 2.
What Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly in their translation of 1999 render as “distress” for the German “die Not,” Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu render as “plight” in their translation of 2012. Throughout this book, I have been using the latter translation for quotes, though I use in my discussions the former translation’s rendering of “die Not” as distress.
- 3.
I am speaking here about the first type of boredom that Heidegger deals with in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929). Heidegger calls this type of boredom “becoming bored by something” as opposed to becoming bored with something and profound boredom. Boredom of this type arises from “the fact that particular things, in what they offer us or do not offer us and in the way that they do so, are in each case co-determined by a particular time, in each case have their particular time. Things can leave us empty only along with that being held in limbo that proceeds from time. On the other hand, this time that drags can hold us in limbo only if things having the characterized possibility of refusal stand at the disposal of time, if they are bound to time … what is at issue here in the possibility of boredom is an as yet obscure relation of the dragging along of time to the things that refuse themselves” (FCM: 105). Commodity fetishism is that kind of phenomenon whereby we contribute actively to the thing not offering itself to us. The dragging of time here arises from the quick refusal of the thing in its readiness-to-hand.
- 4.
Ramachandra Guha writes that “the modern sector has moved aggressively into the remaining resource frontiers of India—the North-East, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. This biased ‘development’ has proved Gandhi’s contention that ‘the blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built’ … one could say that the key contribution of the Indian environmental movement has been to point to inequalities of consumption within a society or nation. India’s North-East has been for metropolitan India what Iraq and other such countries have been for imperialist America” (2008: 232–33).
- 5.
In this manner of thinking, we should not fail to hear echoes of the Hegelian conception of differentiation within identity by way of which the self-identity of something is maintained through its internally differential relation to itself. At the same time, Hegel’s teleological triumphalism of Western history, which bleakly ends up in technological nihilism, was thoroughly undercut by Heidegger’s history of Being.
- 6.
- 7.
This point is discussed in O’Leary (2007), Halbfass (1992) and Mohanty (1992). Joseph O’Leary rightly points out that Heidegger understood the development of intellectual and religious traditions everywhere as contingent cultural–historical processes so that “what seems normative and natural within one culture may remain unthought of in another” (2007: 178). The question of Being as Heidegger understands it with regard to the west is unique not because it cannot be found anywhere else at all but because it “did not come to pass in this insistent, determining way in other traditions, despite their random and tentative broodings on the sense of the word ‘being’” (O’Leary 2007: 180). This is why the planetary phase of the Western understanding of Being as enframing is a danger for Heidegger. It means a disquieting cultural levelling. It is an imposition that people everywhere should think in terms of this duality and now more specifically that every phenomenon be understood in terms of the technological understanding of Being. On the other hand, what calls for questioning is Heidegger’s insistence that for overcoming the planetary understanding of Being, the saving power is still to be found in the west.
- 8.
Heidegger says in Letter on Humanism: “Both of these, however, healing and the raging (the malice of rage or evil), can essentially occur in Being only insofar as being itself is in strife. In it is concealed the essential provenance of nihilation. What nihilates comes to the clearing as the negative” (LH: 272; my gloss).
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George, S.K. (2015). Development and Distress: Concluding Remarks. 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_7
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