Heidegger's Heimat

Nietzsche calls the philosopher the ‘physician of culture’. Heidegger implies something similar when he points out that philosophy of art only began (with Plato) when art (and so life) began to decline.1 Both are making the point that it is the task of authentic philosophy to respond to the needs of the times. The condition Heidegger responds to, it seems to me, is first and foremost the loss of place in the age of modern technology: place not in the sense, merely, of a bounded region of space but in the sense of dwelling- place; Heimat or ‘homeland’. Homeland, says Heidegger, that which is ‘near’ to us. Yet nearness implies farness, fails to appear if ‘remoteness ... remains absent’. In the age of jet travel, television, the internet and the cell- phone, however, everything is being reduced to a ‘uniform distanceless- ness’2 in which nothing is ‘remote’, and so nothing ‘near’, and so nothing a dwelling-place.