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- EXISTENCE PRECEDES ONTOLOGY
AT – K – GenericAT – Ontology FirstPlacing ontology before ethical action to quell suffering enables mass extermination and produces a flawed ontologyDavidson 1989 Arnold I., Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter, pg. 425-426, “Questions concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate” I understand Levinas’ work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings: The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face…Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted on our relations with men…the Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate,is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with [people]…that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of. Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face; and, in a clear reference to Heidegger’s idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the country with its trees. In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of though, with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgement of others: As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn’t the other suffer the fate of God? ... I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470]. The suppression of the other, the human, in Heidegger’s thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the imprint of the human will. So Levinas can see in Heidegger’s silence about the gas chambers and death camps “a kind of consent to the horror.” And Cavell can characterize Nazis as “those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do.” Where was Heidegger’s horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented to? Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery’s aphorism, “ ‘Les evenements ne sontl’ecume des choses’ (‘Events are but the foam of things’)”. I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop. You can’t tell us what our ontology is, and assuming you can is the worst kind of managerial thought because it denies the signal variation in seemingly synonymous termsShirky 2005 Clay, decentralization and technology consultant to Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC, adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer, the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”, http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#the_only_group The mind-reading aspect shows up in conversations about controlled vocabularies. Whenever users are allowed to label or tag things, someone always says "Hey, I know! Let's make a thesaurus, so that if you tag something 'Mac' and I tag it 'Apple' and somebody else tags it 'OSX', we all end up looking at the same thing!" They point to the signal loss from the fact that users, although they use these three different labels, are talking about the same thing. The assumption is that we both can and should read people's minds, that we can understand what they meant when they used a particular label, and, understanding that, we can start to restrict those labels, or at least map them easily onto one another.This looks relatively simple with the Apple/Mac/OSX example, but when we start to expand to other groups of related words, like movies, film, and cinema, the case for the thesaurus becomes much less clear. I learned this from Brad Fitzpatrick's design for LiveJournal, which allows user to list their own interests. LiveJournal makes absolutely no attempt to enforce solidarity or a thesaurus or a minimal set of terms, no check-box, no drop-box, just free-text typing. Some people say they're interested in movies. Some people say they're interested in film. Some people say they're interested in cinema. The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself, and no value in protecting the user from too many matches. When we get to really contested terms like queer/gay/homosexual, by this point, all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion. "Oh, the people talking about 'queer politics' and the people talking about 'the homosexual agenda', they're really talking about the same thing." Oh no they're not. If you think the movies and cinema people were going to have a fight, wait til you get the queer politics and homosexual agenda people in the same room. You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers,about the best way to categorize.They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus. The ontological question is impossible to answer. The kritik will lock us into an infinitely regressive cycle destroying political praxis.Levinas and Nemo 1985 Emmanuel (professor of philosophy) and Philippe (professor of new philosophy), Ethics and Infinity, 1985, pg. 6-7 Are we not in need of still more precautions? Must we not step back from this question to raise another, to recognize the obvious circularity of asking what is the “What is . .?“ question? It seems to beg the question. Is our new suspicion, then, that Heidegger begs the question of metaphysics when he asks “What is poetry?” or “What is thinking?”? Yet his thought is insistently anti-metaphysical. Why, then, does he retain the metaphysical question par excellence? Aware of just such an objection, he proposes, against the vicious circle of the petitio principi, an alternative, productive circularity: hermeneutic questioning. To ask “What is. . .?“ does not partake of onto-theo-logy if one acknowledges (1) that the answer can never be fixed absolutely, but calls essentially, endlessly, for additional “What is . . .?“ questions. Dialectical refinement here replaces vicious circularity. Further, beyond the openmindedness called for by dialectical refinement, hermeneutic questioning (2) insists on avoiding subjective impositions, on avoiding reading into rather than harkening to things. One must harken to the things themselves, ultimately to being, in a careful attunement to what is. But do the refinement and care of the hermeneutic question — which succeed in avoiding ontotheo-logy succeed in avoiding all viciousness? Certainly they convert a simple fallacy into a productive inquiry, they open a path for thought. But is it not the case that however much refinement and care one brings to bear, to ask what something is leads to asking what something else is, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum? What is disturbing in this is not so much the infinity of interpretive depth, which has the virtue of escaping onto-theo-logy and remaining true to the way things are, to the phenomena, the coming to be and passing away of being. Rather, the problem lies in the influence the endlessly open horizon of such thinking exerts on the way of such thought. That is, the problem lies in what seems to be the very virtue of hermeneutic thought, namely, the doggedness of the “What is . . .?“ question, in its inability to escape itself, to escape being and essence.
Paul, associate professor and director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American University, Winter ‘3 [“Leftist criticism of "nature", Dissent, Vol. 50, Iss. 1, JT] All attempts to listen to nature are social constructions--except one. Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge the distinction between physical existence and nonexistence. As I have said, postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial. We can't ascribe meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions. And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do that). But we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental preservation. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.8 Mb. Share with your friends:
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