Michael E. Zimmerman

Heidegger, Buddhism, and deep ecology

Many commentators have remarked on the affinities between Heideggers thought and East Asian traditions such as Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism. In this essay, I shall examine critically some aspects of the apparent rapport between Heideggers thought and Mahayana Buddhism. One reason for recent interest in Heideggers thought and in Buddhism is that both are critical of and claim to offer an alternative to the anthropocentrism and dualism that some critics say is responsible for todays environmental crisis. According to such critics, Western humankind is particularly anthropocentric. Regarding humanity as the source of all meaning, purpose, and value, humans justify doing anything they want with the natural world. Western humanity also thinks in terms of dualisms and binary oppositions, such as mind versus body, reason versus feeling, man versus nature, male versus female.

INTEGRAL ECOLOGY: A PERSPECTIVAL, DEVELOPMENTAL, AND COORDINATING APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

Abstract Integral Ecology uses multiple perspectives to analyze environmental problems. Four of Integral Ecologys major analytical perspectives (known as the quadrants) correspond to the four divisions of the liberal arts and sciences: fine arts, natural science, social science, and humanities. Integral Ecology also utilizes the analytical perspective provided by the idea of cultural moral development. This perspective helps to reveal how stakeholders at different developmental stages disclose a phenomenon, in this case, a tropical forest that loggers propose to clear-cut. Integral Ecology takes into account all pertinent perspectives, in order to arrive at the best possible solution to environmental problems and conflicts.

The role of spiritual discipline in learning to dwell on earth

Western people, particularly North Americans, are action-oriented and voluntaristic. For two centuries at least, we have sought to alter our social and economic conditions to bring about a new and better world. Today, faced with an environmental crisis that results largely from the attempt to improve the world through industrialization, we hear much talk about the need to learn how to dwell in harmony with the earth. What is required, we are told, is a new way of thinking, a ‘paradigm shift’ that will lead to socioeconomic behavior more compatible with both the biosphere and the spiritual needs of humanity.1 With increasing frequency, writers turn to the thought of Martin Heidegger as a source for such a new understanding of who we are. Heidegger speaks of our need to “dwell” on earth appropriately by “sparing and preserving” beings, by “letting beings be.”

Heidegger and Nietzsche On Authentic Time

Today, half a century after the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and not long after the death of this great Denker, clouds of uncertainty still surround that work in particular, and Heidegger’s thinking in general. This is certainly true of the English-speaking world, whose philosophical traditions are rather different from those of Germany. Anglo-American philosophy, which so often tries to align itself with ’common sense’, does not know what to make of Heidegger’s philosophy, which is anything but common-sensical. Heidegger is highly critical of that common sense, itself

Heidegger on Techno-Posthumanism

The film under discussion is Transcendent Man: The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil (Ptolemy, 2009). Here and in Kurzweil’s bestselling books, such as The Singularity Is Near (2006), he envisions for humankind and its artificial progeny powers and possibilities that were traditionally accorded only to a deity: virtual immortality, omniscience, mastery over nature, capacity to infuse everything with profoundly interconnected intelligence, and even the power to bring the dead back to life.

Social theory, climate change, and the humanity–nature relation

Antonio cites J. K. Galbraith (among others) as having criticized a view central to mainstream economics, namely, that “human nature dictates an unlimited ‘urgency of wants,’ naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites.” In citing Galbraith, Antonio evidently has some sympathy for the formers viewpoint, which I now examine.