Thinking the Catastrophe:

Heideggers Antihumanism and

Beyond
by Tomas Ciucelis

Today catastrophe can be recognised as one of the leading themes in the whole
variety of interconnected contemporary discourses throughout the disciplines
such as ecology (climate change), politics (global war as a potential outcome of
failed international relations), economics (antagonisms of capitalism and
meltdown of markets), culture studies (the prevalence of disaster movies),
sociology (living after the end of history), bioethics (post-humanism), and, last
but not least, the interdisciplinary concern with a cosmic catastrophe (e.g., a
meteor strike) that can wipe out all the disciplines at once. Here, in the context
of this prevailing concern, I would like to ask: what does thinking catastrophe
mean in philosophy? How and what does catastrophe complete, dissolve, or
terminate? In this essay I would like to argue that we can address these
questions by discussing Heideggers call to abandon philosophy for a new kind
of thinkinga call that, in the light of contemporary philosophical
developments, can also be seen as catastrophic for its own part. As Heidegger
writes in the conclusion to his essay Letter on Humanism: The thinking that
is to come is no longer philosophy because it thinks more originally than
1
metaphysics, a name identical to philosophy. This call for an end to
philosophy itself opens up a problem of the transition from thinking of a
radical break to thinking as a radical break (given that the latter should not be
reduced to a mere effect on thought).

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 181.

I will begin by turning toward the etymology of the term itself. In ancient
Greece, the term katastroph () has been used to denote a dramatic
and unexpected conclusion of a stage play, usually with a sad ending: the
down-turn of narrative. Strictly speaking, catastrophe as a process of ending
has two independent modes of operation: 1) it is a result of all the conditions
that are pre-given in a dramatic narrative; in this sense, catastrophe is
denouementa final part of the play, unknotting, unexpected resolution; and
2) it spells the end of an immersion in a story as such through an interruption
from outside. Such an interplay between immanent (that which remains
within) and imminent (in the sense of overhanging above) relies on the
question of where the reason of catastrophe is to be foundwithin or outside
the story. Which one is the true catastrophethe one that emerges from the
inner tensions of subjective causality (e.g., Oedipus being revealed as the
husband to his own mother); or the one that befalls from the outside of
subjectivity and terminates the story without having anything to do with the
meaning of it (e.g., a meteorite strike that annihilates the whole stage with all
the actors on it)? The second case opens up a new discourse precisely because
the arrival of katastroph is seen as a disruptive intrusionthe emergence of
the non-subjectivethat can always bring (reveal) something new; it is
something that exceeds human existence, something that comes from outside
of it. This is where the question of catastrophe turns into question of Being.
In Being and Time, Heidegger chose the analysis of Dasein's way of existence
(i.e., human ek-sistence) as a mode of access to the larger questionnamely,
the question of meaning of Being. However, significantly enough, in his later
work he came to see that his original focus on Dasein was an anthropocentric
mistake. By acknowledging that, Heidegger came to reject the existentialist
core of his early work.
In his later works (especially his essays On the Essence of Truth (1943), Letter
on Humanism (1947), The Question Concerning Technology (1953), and,
especially The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (1966)), Heidegger
Here I use this strategy which, instead of being merely a linguistic or deconstructive
exercise, also points towards Heideggers assumption that the entire Western tradition
since the Greeks was a kind of error. We find this assumption in his later works, right after
Being and Time (1927), when he embarked on a criticism of the whole genre of Western
philosophy which mistakingly approached Being only through human subjectivity. In Being
and Time, Heidegger relates this mistake in approach to the concept of 'fallenness: our
fallen everyday selves is the structural component of Dasein's existence that deals with
the present. For Heidegger, the focus on 'presence'things 'here and now' in this moment
outside the context of timeis a part of this mistake of Western philosophy. However, we
can see that instead of replacing Western philosophy's mistaken concepts with a new set of
concepts, Heidegger choses to think what has been revealed in the very origin of the
error, at the beginning of Western philosophyi.e., what has been revealed in the
originary term.
2

tries to think the meaning of Being without following through Dasein. While
still stressing the whole-important ontological difference between Being and
beings, Heidegger now posits that in order to talk about the meaning of Being
we have to abandon the very logical form of propositioni.e., Being can not
be formulated and described in the propositional language of traditional
philosophy, logic, and science. Being is then equivalent to nothingi.e., no
thing, not being a thing or an entity. What remains crucial to this changeor,
3
4
what Heidegger calls Kehre, the turning is the concept of truth.
In Being and Time, Heidegger defined the truth not as correspondence (which
is one of the three classical definitions of truth together with coherence and
the pragmatic notion of truth), but through the ancient Greek word for
truthaletheia, which means disclosure or unconcealment. On the one
hand, it means that instead of thinking about truth as a characteristic of
propositions, beliefs, or ideas, truth means that things are revealed to us. In
5
Being and Time, Heidegger calls human the clearing : human is a place where
Being reveals itself. Instead of saying we experience the world, Heidegger
suggests that, somehow, Being itself is responsible for both disclosure and
concealment, which is to say that truth is when Being reveals itself, and
falsehood or error is when Being conceals itself. In the essay On the Essence of
Truth (1943), there is a note appended by Heidegger in 1949, where this point
6
is clarified. Heidegger wrote: The essence of truth is the truth of essence. In
other words, the essence of Being of truth (what truth really is) is the
unconcealment of Being, its self-disclosure. It might seem that Heidegger is
turning around the subject and the predicate, but instead of reading it as I
reveal the world by my presence, it is rather Being reveals itself through me.
For later Heidegger, understanding of Being as a kind of sheltering that
lightens (shows or conceals itself) is something that remained unthought in
philosophy because of the latters idealist nature. Since Plato (and especially
through the idealism of Kant andin a different senseHusserl), philosophy
has been unable to see this because it could not get beyond the Lichtungthe
light that Dasein bringsto see that what is lightened or revealed is made so
by Being itself (and not by enlightened subjects by virtue of their own powers
Here we can also think of turning in terms of metanoiai.e., changing ones mind,
reconsideration after the conversion.
4 Here I would like to stress the possibility of a parallel line of development: the analysis of
the concepts of truth and change in A.Badious philosophy, however due to the
limitations I will not attempt it here. The topic requires a separate and more thorough
analysis.
5 In our analysis of understanding and of disclosedness of the there in general, we have
alluded to the lumen naturale, and designated the disclosedness of Being-in as Daseins
clearing (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 214)
6 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 81.
3

of revealing) in various epochs of history. Heidegger insists on this critique to

an extent that he regards his own Being and Time as a continuation of this
erroneous tradition which shared a common problem: humanism. For
Heidegger, it means that philosophical tradition in the West has conceived
Being through human beingi.e., through Dasein or its feature: ideas,
experiences, cogito, understanding, concepts (e.g., Descartes mental
substance, Kants synthetic a priori, or Husserls phenomena). Therefore
later Heidegger insists that what appears to us is the result of Beings
self-disclosure. All former philosophical thought is now seen by Heidegger as
human-centeredi.e., anthropocentric.
7

In a series of lectures on Nietzsche , Heidegger argued that Nietzschean will to

power (the idea that nature itself can be seen as mere power) is actually the
fulfilment of metaphysics as it was begun by Plato. Nietzsche certainly was not
continuing Platos ideas, however Heidegger draws our attention to the fact
that at the heart of a Western approach to Being is power: the goal was always
to understand Being through and in terms of something humani.e., to put
humanity at the centre of Being and thereby gain a conceptual control over it.
8
For Heidegger, humanism becomes a problem. In other words, we think of
Being as something over which we have control, as something that manifests
through some feature of human understanding. It is in this sense that
Heidegger thinks, that our approach to Being is an expression of what
Nietzsche calls will to powerit refers to our efforts to dominate the Being
rather then to understand it.
It is precisely through this line of thought that we arrive at Heideggers essay
'The Question Concerning Technology' (1953), where he claims that technology
enframes beings as standing reserve (Bestand)i.e., technology treats Being
9
as an inventory of thingsmaterials waiting to be used . At the same time,
technology enframes beings through their use of the modern techno-devices
along with the theories that justify them scientifically (e.g., as instruments, or
media). In a sense, this treats all Being as resource or inventorya status
which covers over the Being that is disclosed. In other words, today we no
longer experience Being as it disclosed itself through earlier epochs of human
beings. At all times in history Being has disclosed itself and also concealed
itself, but for Heidegger, in our age there is a new threat to our understanding
of Being. As it becomes clear from his later texts, science and technology are
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (v.1. The will to power as art, v.2. The eternal recurrence of
the same) (San Francisco: Harper, 1991)
8
Due to the limitations of this essay, I will not deal with the question why humanism is
necessarily a bad thing for Heideggerthis topic needs to be elaborated more thoroughly.
9 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 213-238.
7

themselves the completion of the task of metaphysics that began with Plato:
10
technoscience treats Being through presence (or the present as only one
moment in time) and projects onto the presence the idea that is actually a
concept: a creation of philosophical imagination. In other words, Being is then
shrunk to what is present, and the present is thus made dependent on ideas.
How can we overcome our ways of ignoring Being as it reveals itself?
Heideggerian solution would be only the return to the notion of aletheia: truth
as unconcealment, rather than accurate representation or propositional truth
(i.e., all those philosophical ideas that have been developed for more than two
millennia). Only then, he claims, we can safeguard the mysterious
non-entitative disclosure of Being. Our job is to think that without destroying it
(and the philosophical tradition does exactly thatdestroys the possibility of
thinking about Being in any deep way), and this is why Heidegger makes his
programmatic statements about the need to abandon the whole paradigm of
metaphysical tradition for the sake of new kind of thought.
However, overcoming technology does not mean rejection or destruction
(which would be truly catastrophic). It means returning to the concealed
truth that technology has covered over: namely, that technology itself was a
creative act (of survival, harnessing energy, communication, self-expression).
Attending to the creative act of the invention of technology (which is the
domain of philosophy of technology) can be a way to understand what lies
beneath technology. Instead of asking when/how/why some novel thing is
created, we tend to become so concerned with the created thingthe new
11
technologythat we forget Being that lies under it. Technology fascinates us
and lets our attention to pass over without noticing its origin, its having been
granted by Being. That is why we think about technology not as something
unnecessary, but as something that always has the undisclosed dimension to
it, a dimension that goes beyond function and purpose.
Here we might ask ourselves a question: if things are so different than we
think they are, why we are so wrong? For Heidegger, our technological
enframing of the world has itself been granted by Being, because Being grants
everythingincluding mistakes. Thus, Being, which grants enframing, thereby
I use the term technoscience in the sense that it is used by philosophers of technology,
and primarily by Don Ihde, who follows Heideggers line of thought regarding technology.
Cf. Don Ihde, Technoscience and the 'other' continental philosophy in Continental
Philosophy Review Vol. 33 (1), 2000. 59-74.
11 The discussion of technology in the context of memory can be found in the writings of
Bernard Stiegler. Cf. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and time, Vol. 2, Disorientation (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009) as well as volumes 1 and 2 from the trilogy Technics and
Time.
10

turns itself into an oblivion of itself. In other words, as far as Being is

concerned, nothing resists enframing. Being has granted us all these new
technological means by which we are able to ignore Being and by which Being
is increasingly obscured. Therefore, we need to look in the very heart of our
greatest mistakes and try to understand what we have forgotten and what has
been concealed. What is needed to do this (and here we return to the notion of
catastrophe as a radical paradigmatic shift) is not philosophy, but what
Heidegger calls thinking: in thinking technology we must return to the
ancient Greek notion of tekhn, which precedes the distinction between art
and utilitarian creation.
In 'The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking' (1966), Heidegger makes a
fascinating claim that cybernetics (i.e., information technology) is the final
fulfilment of philosophy:
The development of philosophy into the independent sciences that, however,
interdependently communicate among themselves ever more markedly, is the legitimate
completion of philosophy. Philosophy is ending in the present age. It has found its place
in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity. But the fundamental characteristic
of this scientific attitude is its cybernetic, that is, technological character. The need to ask
about modern technology is presumably dying out to the same extent that technology
more decisively characterizes and directs the appearance of the totality of the world and
12
the position of man in it.

For Heidegger, it is an example of the will to power which understands

reality as pure information, if by information we mean something that is
immediately accessible to the mind. If philosophy has now been completed by
science and technology, then information technology, in this sense, completes
the Western search for power over Being, it substitutes the idea or concept for
Being itself and reifies Being as entity. Trying to understand Being as
information is like trying to say (very much in a Platonic sense) that reality is
an ideaa proposition which, for Heidegger, is wrong. What Heidegger wishes
for instead, is a kind of thinking that remains when such philosophy ends, a
thinking that thinks the opening of aletheia, which is the source of both Being
and thinking. The task is to think thati.e., to think the source. Heidegger calls
that kind of thinking ecstatic (Gr. ek-stasis) i.e., outside the self. Thus the
whole method of thinking by imposing the concepts of the self on Being (what
the history of philosophy was trying to to) needs to be rejected in favour of
something like a way of writing that is no longer propositional: it would mean
an attempt to write and think the moment of revelation of Being.

12

Heidegger, Basic Writings, 313-14.

Technology, in this broad sense, imposes a framework or a structure through

which we understand the world. It is interesting to note how this Heideggerian
position resonates with Steven Shaviros observation which he made in his
article Non-Phenomenological Thought:
Just as the invention of the phonograph and the cinema coincided with worries about the
material and the immaterial, so our contemporary elaborations on digital technologies
coincide with worries about whether the real even exists, and whether we have access to
13
it.

The idea that digital technologies are in certain correlation with the
philosophical interpretations is in effect a continuation of Heideggers point
about reality being present as information. The problematic aspect of such
presence would be grounded in the specificity of technology that is used to
represent the reality. By talking about the worries wether the real even exists
Shaviro means that the technologies of representation, by virtue of their
increasing complexity and realism, are aligning themselves with
thinkingwhich is precisely what Heidegger means by announcing the
fulfilment of philosophy in cybernetics, the technological high point at the
time.
Heidegger was talking about thinking as opposed to traditional metaphysics,
but we cannot ignore the fact that thinkingno matter how novel it
isalways remains within the subject-object relation or, to use Heideggerian
terms, within the relation between Being and beings. Thus Heideggers call for
breaking with humanism is somewhat still necessarily rooted in the narrative
that he aims to abandon, which is to sayreturning to the aforementioned
taxonomy of catastrophethe quality of Heideggerian catastrophic turn is an
immanent one: for Heidegger, the whole metaphysical tradition, even if it is a
mistake, is still a useful and usable mistake because it can reveal the true
nature of Being by showing us what went wrong. The break that Heidegger
proposes is not total, it does not come from some demonstrable outsideness
of our relation to the world. This situation of being locked within the circle of
correlation between the thought and the world is receiving a lot of attention in
contemporary developments in continental philosophy. In the context of
thinking the catastrophe, I see those developments as attempts to make a turn
in thinking that is even more catastrophic than the one proposed by
Heidegger.

Steven Shaviro, Non-Phenomenological Thought in Speculations. Aesthetics in the 21st

Century. R.Askin, P.J.Ennis, A.Hgler, P.Schweighauser (eds.) (Brooklyn: Punctum Books,
2014), 55.
13

I would like to conclude with two short examples of attempts to think a truly
catastrophic break between human subjectivity and the world: Quentin
Meillasouxs anti-correlationism and Steven Shaviros non-phenomenological
thought.
In the case of Meillasoux, it is interesting to consider the difference between
Heideggers post-philosophical thought and Meillassouxs post-finite thought
in terms of how they both correspond respectively with immanent and
imminent types of katastroph: Heidegger resolves and untangles, and
Meillassoux spells an abrupt end of immersion. In Meillassouxs speculative
14
philosophy, Heidegger is very much rooted in correlationism the idea
according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking
15
and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.
Heideggers post-philosophical thinking, for Meillassoux, is still necessarily
correlationist insofar as it is intentional and it implies a relation to the world
(or, in Heideggerian terms, the irreducible ontological difference between
Being and beings). Meillassoux tries to show how Being in itself remains
indifferent to thought and therefore does not require to be correlated with it
by claiming an access to an absolute that is at once external to thought and in
16
itself devoid of all subjectivity, and for Meillassoux, it is precisely
mathematics which provides us with this access to an absolute, because
mathematics escapes the finitude of thought by escaping meaning as sucha
claim which requires to be discussed separately.
Steven Shaviro, for his part, proposes a different, but no less interesting
catastrophic turn, by positing a possibility of a nonrelational thought:
Deleuze offers an anti-phenomenological account of consciousness. As Deleuze puts it
17
elsewhere, it is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something;
rather, we must reach the point where consciousness ceases to be a light cast upon
18
objects in order to become a pure phosphorescence of things in themselves. Deleuzes
19
suggestion that all consciousness is something offers a powerful response, not just to

The term invented by Q.Meillassoux and widely used in speculative philosophy.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 5.
16 Quentin Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the
14
15

Meaningless Sign, a talk at Freie Universitt Berlin, 20 April 2012,

https://www.scribd.com/doc/229745782/Iteration-Reiteration-Repetition-a-Speculative-An
alysis-of-the-Meaningless-Sign (accessed 1 December, 2014), 2.
17
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press), 220.
18 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M.Lester and C.Stivale (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969), 311.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press), 56.

turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxieties about the relation of mind and matter, but also to
turn-of-the-twenty-first-century anxieties about the nature of the real. <> To follow
[these] clues from Whitehead and Deleuze (and through them, James and Bergson) would
mean to posit a sort of thought that is nonrelationalor even autistic. This means
developing a notion of thought that is pre-cognitive (involving feeling rather than
articulated judgements) and non-intentional (not directed towards an object with which
it would be correlated.) Such a non-phenomenological (but also non-intellectual) image
of thought can be composed on the basis of Whiteheads notion of prehension as an
alternative to Husserlian intentionality. Such a thought is nonreflexive, probably
nonconscious, and even autistic; it is not correlative to being, but immanently intrinsic
within it. At this primordial (or better, humble) level, thought just is, without having a
20
correlate.

As seen in the context of Heideggers call for a non-propositional language of

traditional philosophy, logic, and science, Shaviros autistic thought poses
further questions about the new strategies of catastrophic break with
humanism. If we are assuming the possibility of nonrelational thought, does
that mean we can locate the non-human Being (i.e., absolute otherness)
within human Dasein that we somehow can relate to in a non-relational way?
How are we ever entitled to say that any kind of non-relational thought (or, in
Meillassouxs case, a matheme) is not a product of thought?

20

Shaviro, Non-Phenomenological Thought, 55-6.