The Technological Abyss: Heideggerian Ontology and Climate Change

Abstract

 Whenever a decision is made in a social, political, or economic context, it is implicitly grounded in an ethical outlook. But where do these outlooks come from? To investigate this query, I examine the basis for ethical decisions regarding technology, focusing specifically on geoengineering responses to climate change. Subsequently, I argue that ethical considerations concerning climate change, and their corresponding practical decisions, cannot be reliably made without sufficient intelligibility regarding the objects and entities these decisions pertain to. To achieve this, I employ a Heideggerian phenomenological framework through which being affords intelligibility. Doing so elucidates fundamental inconsistencies in the way humans interact with technology. We are caught up in what Heidegger calls enframing, the representation of beings as energy reserves. This is the ground on which our ethical claims are based, but representation cannot afford actuality. When things are represented in this way, truth is set aside in favour of will, and intelligibility is lost. The goal, then—if we wish our ethical decisions to be legitimate—must be to gain intelligibility. We must therefore free ourselves from enframing and look toward being. We cannot, as Heidegger says, affect enframing’s removal, but we can prepare ourselves for such a change. Only once this change occurs, can our relationship to technology be intelligible.