The only way to eliminate or lose Being is to accept a world in which that is possible.

We reject that concept but your alt links to itself Latour '93 Bruno We Have Never Been Modern p. 66-7 Who has forgotten...theous.
Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as a pure stock. Look around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects objects and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for machines, they are laden with subjects and collectives. How could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its trace of Being? This is never in anyones power; otherwise we should have to imagine that we have truly been modern, we should be taken in by the upper half of the modern Constitution. Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes: anyone who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As Levi-Strauss says, the barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism. (LeviStrauss, [1987, p. 12). Those who have failed to undertake empirical studies of sciences, technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have lost the traces of Being that are distributed everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest then you will indeed feel a tragic loss. But what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heideggers epigones have converted that glaring weakness into a strength. We dont know anything empirical, but that doesnt matter, since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing. On the contrary: we have everything, since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and beings. We are carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who believed what the modern Constitution said about itself without understanding that what is at issue there is only half of a larger mechanism which has never abandoned the old anthropological matrix. No one can forget Being, since there has never been a modern world, or, by the same token, metaphysics. We have always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, preKantian, pre- Nietzschean. No radical revolution can separate us from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary counter- revolutions to lead us back to what has never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: Einai gar kai entautha theous.

Heideggers philosophy was not normative. Technology is simply Dasein expression to a more efficient degree. That doesnt mean it should be stopped or halted; its a natural occurrence Zimmerman professor of philosophy at Tulane 2k3 Michael, Eco-phenomenology
p. 93-4 In his...possible In his excellent biography of Heidegger, Rudiger Sanfranski argues in a way that seems consistent with Sheehans view. For Heidegger, authenticity is an extraordinary intensification of human existence, a very rare, even blissful disclosure of the temporalizing no-thingness at work through Dasein. Despite generating inexpressible wonder and terror, such a disclosure offers no insights about the structure of beings, nor any necessary revelations about political and ethical matters. Science and other disciplines seek to disclose those structures, just as moral direction must be worked out by individuals and! or communities on their own and as best they can, without the assistance of either Ereignis or eternal grounds. Hence, Heideggers ideas of Gelassenheit and letting things be may be read not as recommending a less domineering attitude toward nature, despite Heideggers remarks to the contrary. Instead, Gelassenheit may involve taking up a detached attitude toward modern technology, whose all-controlling impetus not only cannot be halted, but ought not to be halted. Seen from this perspective, modern technology is simply Dasein doing its thing with increasing effectiveness. Guidance for decision making must come from a source other than Eigentlichkeit or Ereignis. Even the maxim that I cited earliernamely, that great ability (e.g., the capacity to disclose beings as beings) confers equally great responsibilitycannot be derived from the experience of Ereignis. Apparently, then, we must conclude that the source of Heideggers frequent criticisms of modern technology (nihilism I), including the destruction of nature, must be other than nihilism II, that is, constriction of Daseins experience of Ereignis, the opening of the open. That true source for Heideggers critique of nihilism I may itself be manifold, including conservative ideology, anticommunism, romantic love for nature, contempt for commercialism and mass society, and so on. Even if Heidegger did insist that the technological disclosure of being is merely partial, then, Sheehan is right that Dasein cannot expect the future dawn of a post- technological, non- domineering clearing. Instead, there are far better grounds for thinking that this is it. If so, the progressive reading of Western history according to which humankind will eventually achieve a godlike power over beings, would make more sense than Heideggers reading of history as a decline into the nihilism II (concealment of Ereignis) that makes nihilism I (modern technology) possible.

There's no alternative to the technological disclosure of beingsHeidegger himself concedes Zimmerman 03 (Michael, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eco-phenomenology : back to the earth itself, p.
87-9) Elsewhere, I have argued that Heidegger's lack of interest in cosmology, his antinaturalistic stance (including his insistence that humans are not animals), and his relation to National Socialism create obstacles to reading his thought as consistent with contemporary environmentalism and/or Green politics.46 Here, however, I focus attention on a possibility that would pose an even more fundamental problem. The possibility is that Heidegger's own thought-despite his own personal or political preferences-is consistent with modernity's project of the technological domination of nature.

At times, Heidegger indicated that humankind may undergo a transformation that will initiate a nondomineering way of disclosing beings. Some commentators, however, including Thomas J. Sheehan, contend that such a transformation would be inconsistent with the basic thrust of Heidegger's thought.
According to Sheehan, Heidegger saw no escape from the nihilism of technological modernity.47 For Heidegger, nihilism has two senses: nihilism I and nihilism II. Nihilism I refers to technological modernity's attempt to disclose all beings as raw material. Nihilism II refers to a culture's obliviousness about the nihil, the clearing, Ereignis, which makes possible Dasein's interpretative and practical encounter with beings. Ereignis cannot be grasped by the human intellect, which is capable only of comprehending beings as beings. Allegedly, nihilism II makes possible nihilism I; that is, the obscuration of Ereignis makes Dasein blind to its ontologically unique endowment. Consequently, Dasein interprets itself merely as the clever animal seeking control of everything through modern science and technology. Sheehan argues, however, that in Heidegger's own view, Aristotle's thought-which is central to the entire Western tradition-ultimately leads to nihilism I. Moreover, even if a few philosophers point toward Ereignis, thereby minimally easing nihilism 11, this fact cannot in and of itself influence nihilism I. Whether or not Dasein catches a sideways glance of Ereignis, Western Dasein will inevitably increase its capacity for disclosing and manipulating beings. Given the

reciprocal relation between the beings that tend toward manifesting themselves and the human Dasein that discloses them, total technological disclosure of beings cannot be avoided. Sheehan adds

that the ethical, political, and social challenges posed by the looming possibility of the total disclosure of beings must be met with means other than those used by Heideggerians meditating on Ereignis. At one time, Heidegger did seem to think that disclosing nihilism II could transform nihilism I. In fact, he defended his involvement with National Socialism as part of his own philosophical effort to overcome (iiherzwinden) nihilism. Later on, however, having abandoned this disastrous political engagement, he spoke not of Uherwindung, but rather of veruwindung. As Sheehan comments, Verzoinding involves not the overcoming of nihilism I, but instead of "a 'freeing' of oneself from social and cultural nihilism by seeing its rootedness in a deeper and unsurpassable 'nihilism that is in fact the human condition."4s If Sheehan is right, Heidegger's well-known utterance that "only a god can save us now" is best read ironically, given his views about the inevitability of Dasein interpreting beings ever more completely. Further, his talk of a dispensation (Geschick) that may enable Dasein to interpret beings in a nondomineering way is best read as an instance of mythologizing that has been described as Heidegger's "private religion." 49 Sheehan observes that understanding everything as raw material is possible only insofar as Dasein exists within the clearing that allows Dasein to encounter and to interpret beings as beings. Heidegger remarked: "Even if the contemporary and closest humankind, technologized and equipped to the utmost, is in a planetary condition for which the general distinction between 'war and peace' belongs to things gone by, even then humanity still lives 'poetically' on this earth...." Immediately, however, he adds the following: ". . . but he lives in essential opposition (Gegenwesen) to poetry and hence without need and therefore [is] inaccessible for its essence."50 Here, Heidegger gives with one hand what he takes away with another. True, modernity does disclose the being of beings, but not the poetizing mode of being heralded by Holderlin, nor the self-blossoming mode of being physis-revealed by Aristotle. To experience an alternative way of disclosing beings, Heidegger maintained, humankind must become attuned to its own profound lack, its ontological need. Self-assertive humankind discloses all beings as flexible raw material without any internal limits. Such disclosure is a nihilism that correlates with humanism, "the ideology which asserts that human being is fulfilled in abetting the limitless availability and intelligibility of every thing that is."51

At times, Heidegger suggested that humankind reject modernity and become open for a new mode of ontological understanding that enables Dasein to become rooted again in the earth. Elsewhere, however, he indicated-for example, in his essay "On the Question of Being," dedicated to Ernst Jiinger that there is no alternative to the technological disclosure of being, which involves the correlation between nature

as raw material and Dasein as the Gestalt of the worker-soldier who uses such raw material for gaining ever greater power.-52 Many commentators on Heidegger conclude that the technological disclosure of beings decreases Dasein's overall capacity for ontological disclosure. Sheehan maintains, however, that far from offering a constricted disclosure of beings, modern science reveals them more thoroughly than ever before. Hence, he asks: "Why are they [technological disclosure and Ereignis] correlative in an apparently zerosum way, such that the increase in the power and domination of the Gestalt of the worker would necessarily entail the decrease in the Power of appropriation [Ereignis]?"53 The scientific-technological disclosure of beings has made possible extraordinary improvements in human wellbeing, but that same disclosure also poses enormous social, ethical, and political problems associated with nihilism I. Nevertheless, according to Sheehan, the technological disclosure of beings does not arise from the historical constriction in or human obliviousness to the clearing/ Ereignis. Humankind has always been and remains oblivious to the clearing. The technological disclosure of beings is the perhaps inevitable result of humankind exploiting its capacity for uncovering, understanding, and manipulating beings.

Heideggers theory reduces the value to lifehe forces joyless disconnection from the real world. Wolin, 90 - Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center - 1990 (Richard Wolin, The
Politics of Being, P. 49-50)

Heidegger's characterization of everydayness is so disproportionately negative that we are seemingly left with no immanent prospects for realizing our authentic natures in the domain of ontic life as such. For on the basis of his phenomenological descriptions, it would seem that the ontic sphere in general- "worldliness" in its entirety-has been "colonized" by the They. Here, we see that Heidegger's pessimistic philosophical anthropology and his "joyless" social ontology ultimately join forces. The result is a radical devaluation of the life-world, that delicate substratum of everyday human sociation which existential phenomenology claims to redeem. At

this point, one might raise against Heidegger's social ontology the same charge he levels against Husserl's theory of the pure, transcendental ego: it suffers from an impoverishment of world-relations-a fact clearly evinced in Heidegger's self-defeating celebration of the "non-relational" character of authentic Dasein cited above. For how can the authenticity of a Dasein that is essentially "non -relational" ever attain realization in the sphere of ontic life?

Heideggarian ontology leaves us indifferent to suffering and prevents articulation of any ethical system Theodore J Kisiel, Ph.D., Duquesne University Reading Heidegger from the start, p. 14-15 1994
Heidegger's remarkable reticence toward this question over a long career eventually prompted Jean Beaufret's question, after the cataclysms of the Second World War, on the relationship of his ontology to a possible ethics. Even the young Heidegger was clearly interested more in "the true" and "the one" among the transcendentals of being and the Neo-Kantian scheme of values than in "the good." A repeated promise to pursue the latter was repeatedly put aside for more pressing aletheiological issues. The absence of an outspoken ethics is made all the more acute for us now, as we learn more and more about both the "ontic" and "ontological" career of this prominent native son of a Germany caught up in the thick of the worldhistorical events of our century. John Caputo examines the early Heidegger's retrieval of primal Christianity and finds his reading of the biblical narratives woefully one-sided in favor of a tough-minded Pauline-Lutheran machismo, of taking up one's cross and resolutely putting one's shoulder to the heavy weight of life. What Heidegger misses in the biblical message is the tender-hearted dimension of kardia, mercy, lifting the burden of the enfeebled other who is afflicted and downtrodden, solicitude (Fursorge) for the flesh of the suffering and disabled other, and the facticity of the pain of the other exercising its claim over me. For us earth-dwellers the remote essentialist ethics in the later Heidegger, for whom the staggeringly incomprehensible mega-deaths of annihilation camps and nuclear holocausts are but grim spinoffs of the technological efficiency of global agricultural/industrial complexes, where the new global plague of AIDS meets its match in the global mobilization of medical demographics, clearly becomes even more insensitive to the concrete suffering subjects of actual history. Inverting the implications of Emmanuel Levinas's critique of the absence of an ethics in a Heideggerian ontology thus subject to totalitarianism like all ontologies, Jean Grondin demonstrates instead that a presuppositionally attuned ontology of Dasein is in fact the overt rehabilitation of the radically ethical and practical from the start, in reaction to the overly theoretized epistemological and methodological bent of philosophies then current. The futurally conative "to-be" of care is ethically even more formal than Kant's Sol/en (ought), and the tendency to fall from self-determination is akin to the young Hegelian "self-alienation." The latter adoption by Heidegger suggests that a formalization of the critique of ideology, its

unmasking of the obstacles of false consciousness to the exercise of human freedom, is at work here. But the ultimate ethical thrust of all of Heidegger's formal indications is in their indexical exhortation to individual appropriation and self-actualization in accord with our differing situations. This ethical exhortation to our own occasionality, both individual and collective, is itself ontologically formalized in the existential of the call of conscience. The absence of a specific ethics is a reaction against the traditionally sharp division and fragmentation of disciplines in a philosophy that always must re-turn such divisions to the whole of experience. Thus the ethical motive in the later Heidegger expresses itself in the even larger concern of preparing a transformed dwelling (ethos) on this earth for the human being subject to the epochal destiny of technological nihilism. The utopian magnifications of such a messianic orientation, also reminiscent of the young Hegelians, may account for Heidegger's own political errancy. and indeed that of any philosophical ethics. Their ethical determination of being is infinitely regressive, and is framed upon the same anthropocentric hierarchy they seek to kritik. The aff provides the necessary limit on this system and prevent wasteful dilution of our ethical duty. Thomson 4 (Iain, Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of New Mexico. Ontology and Ethics at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy, published in Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself copyright 03. PDF accessed July 2, 2008 p. 401-03) The suggestion, put provocatively, is that eco-phenomenologists should answer the question, Which entities deserve intrinsic rights?, with: All Dasein, that is, all entities whose being s an issue for them, and only these entities (although other entities could, of course, deserve rights instrumentally, in virtue of their relations to Dasein, including relations of eco-systemic interdependence). On this neo-Heideggerian ecophenomenological view, what counts (in contrast to the naturalistic, neo-Nietzschean and Husserlian posi- tions considered earlier) is not life per se, but rather a life that has a temporally-enduring world that matters to it explicitly. Heidegger did well to escape the gravity of his age far enough to recognize that being a Dasein is not an all-ornothing affair, since there are degrees of having a world. Still, as Llewelyn observes, Heideggers phenomenology ... does not entail this ... thinking of the non-human other. It only enables it (on Llewelyns view, by conceiving of Dasein broadly as beings oikos, the ecologicality of being (pp. 58, 62)). The simple tripartite distinction Heidegger famously proposes in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics between the worldless rock, the world-poor animal, and the world-rich Dasein really only inaugurates the more difficult labor of drawing fine-grained distinctions on a much fuller continuum. We might imagine such a continuum of Dasein as stretching, for example, from: (1) worldless inorganic
matter; to (2) similarly worldless invertebrate organisms (lacking a nervous-system and so physiologically incapable of sensation); to (3) simple vertebrate organisms (possessing of the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, and so somewhere between being worldless and world-poor); to (4) world- poor entities like the lizard on the rock and cow in the field (sentient but not reflexive, apparently permanently immersed in perceptual immediacy); to (5) the near-Dasein of such entities as the chimpanzee (whose selfawareness is demonstrated, for example, by a remarkable capacity to incorporate an explicit understanding of its role in a complex social group into a creative plan to accomplish difficult, temporally- distant goals); to (6) the partial Dasein of such entities as gorillas (who conveniently demonstrate their possession of a world by learning our languages); to (7) the potential Dasein of young children (who combine capacities like (6) with the potential for (8)); to (8) the rich world of full Dasein (including not only normal adult human beings but also whatever other entities be they organic, android, or alien possess a reflexive self-understanding making them capable of experiencing not merely pleasure and pain but also immense suffering and sublime elevation, and of developing and pursuing a self-understanding which gives meaning to their lives from within); and, perhaps, to (9) entities with even richer worlds than human Dasein who could deny the possibility?

This suggested elaboration of a graded continuum of

Dasein remains too simplistic and speculative, of course, and perhaps its implicit hierarchy is marked by a residual anthropocentrism. Notice, however, that the same criticisms hold even for extreme, eco-centric perspectives, which yield such anthropomorphizing confusions as Klavers belief that a stone can have being-in-theworld (pp. 15962) and Diehms idea that, in all organisms, the horizon opened by need is, minimally, a horizon of self- concern, an openness to experience, such that mere being alive ... is ppropriately ... characterized as being-for-itself (p. 181). Such implicitly anthropomorphic descriptions which seek to bestow upon simple organic (and even inorganic) entities reflexive capacities such as self-concern, being-for-itself, and even being-in-the-world (in other words, Dasein) generate a hyperbolic, neoLevinasian extension of ethical concern in which ethical duties, multiplied to infinity, become uselessly diluted (as Casey argues).48