Later Heidegger

I've begun listening to Sean Dorrance Kelly* on Later Heidegger. Early Heidegger is his work in Being and Time, in which he believed he was doing Fundamental Ontology - really getting to the bottom of how things are. Later, Heidegger decided that it was a mistaken value judgement to call his work Fundamental and final. Not that his insight wasn't the deepest so far, to a level that shows itself as just the way things are. Early Heidegger sees the world show up through practices, recurrent patterns of behaviour that, because phenomena in the world recur, allow you to go on. These practices are all the myriad entwined techniques by which we live in the world.
Later, Heidegger saw a historical progression in the modes of life of different eras that could further illuminate what he was saying about 'Being' as background practices. The techniques of life had a tendency to aim toward or elevate a particular style or maybe a particular verb. (I'm inventing my own description here.) The ancient Greeks in the time of Homer, expected things to exist by whooshing up, staying around for a bit, and then passing away, like storms. The medieval society expected things to exist in their own createdness and to progress more and more to express God's glory, either through Christ-likeness as a Saint, or through material richness or destitution as a moral creature, or through vileness (and I must acknowledge that this category was mostly for non-Christians, and I think is reinforced the forces that became why Jewish people had such a terrible time, up to and including the Holocaust. Rejecting foreigners and refugees is pretty universal practice, and survived several epochs of other understandings of being. But the catholic church of the middle ages (AFAIK) just surfed the convenient waves of public resentment.)
Heidegger felt that the current understanding of being (which he had uncovered) was Technological - that this was a technological age, in which the defining verb should be enframing (he used a german word connected with bookcases. Everyone got confused. As usual.) The technological view sees everything by its usefulness, (cf economics utility, also Kauffman's discussion of work as constrained or channelised energy) and frames things in a 'black box' and looks for more useful alternatives. The problem for this very reasonable view is that humans are easily enframed and hence turned into blank, individual-value-free 'resources.' We lose the distinctive quality of seeing ourselves in relationship to 'being'. Instead we see ourselves as a resource and the panoply of background practices as a resource. Where all previous ages felt being had been given them, we see how unavoidably coupled to it we are. Seeing everything as resources leaves nothing for goals, or goods, that can have validity, independence, or meaning.

* SD Kelly has a lot of Dreyfusian verbal tics, for those who've heard the Dreyfus lectures.

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