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Heidegger's Heimat
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-17, 11:26 authored by Young, JPNietzsche 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.
History
Publication title
International Journal of Philosophical StudiesVolume
19Pagination
285-293ISSN
0967-2559Department/School
School of HumanitiesPublisher
Routledge Taylor & Francis LtdPlace of publication
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, England, Oxfordshire, Ox14 4RnRights statement
Copyright 2011 Taylor & FrancisRepository Status
- Restricted