Haar (1985:4-5) – terra fundamento em lugar de indivíduos?

Before proceeding we once more ask: why are things or the earth the ground instead of individuals? Isn’t the individual essentially on the margin of History? Isn’t the thought of the later Heidegger strangely silent about the place assigned to the individual at the core of History? Selfhood and “mineness,” so radical in Being and Time   — do they no longer make sense? Cannot one imagine at the limit of the epoch a crumbling or a decay of the Order under the pressure of a multiplicity of individual, marginal experiences? Indeed, such a “principle of anarchy,” more Nietzschean than Heideggerian, could not sustain itself without the support of the epoch, thus of Technology, and even less could it shake it. [1] It seems that for the later Heidegger the individual is totally subjugated to dominant principles, [2] or even split, torn, caught up in a tension (which recalls the tension between authenticity and inauthenticity) between a healthy distance vis-à-vis technology, which means meditative thought, and a servile but adequate response to the exigencies of the epoch, which means calculative thinking. Heidegger does not think individual existence can serve as a limit for History. Private life is not the nonhistorical. Nor does he think the individual can find his happiness in forgetfulness, much less in the oblivion of History, as Nietzsche   would have it. [3] If Ereignis touches upon the ahistorical, if it permits thinking to “leave metaphysics to itself,” [4] this is only after having traversed the full breadth of its History.

Thus Ereignis makes the limits and grounds of the World Order, thought according to its historical provenance, appear as purely metaphysical foundations. Are these scientific and technological foundations, derived in a vague and complex fashion from the “first principles” of philosophy, the soil upon which man walks, on which he stands? Of course not. Even if man begins to distance himself from the planet in terms of cosmological space, the earth he still inhabits hardly has the signification of one “planet” among other planets (“planet” means, etymologically, “errant heavenly body,” “Irrstem”). [5] Even though, in the final phase of the History of Being, Earth has already become “planetary,” it nevertheless gives to man [5] the originary experience of place. If there is a height and a depth, an abode, a center of gravity, a “ soil for my body” as Husserl   already said, it is because there is a Urheimat, a “primordial home,” an earth. [6] For we don’t live in the abstract space and distended time (are they habitable?) that the unhappy “voyagers” in spaceships experience. Yet a planetary technoculture governed by information sciences, the media, and standardized consumption has already projected our representations into a neutral and indifferent space. This is why an abyss is hollowed out between the image of the world that produces such a culture and the experience of the “earth” or “natural nature.” “Nature technologically masterable by science and the natural nature of the human abode, which are equally determined in a historical fashion, diverge from each other at a maddening pace as two strange and distant domains.” [7] What is this “natural nature” and what is its relation to being? Does it have a subsistence, a true “reign” outside of the “green spaces” and protected parks? “The Earth remains sheltered in the inapparent law of that possibility which it is itself.” [8] But what is the Earth? Is it merely a new name for the ahistorical immutability of Nature? In which sense is the Earth “sheltered,” spared by History? It does not seem as though it could be purely nonhistorical, for on the one hand it only shows itself through a determinate epoch, through its conceptions, its works, etc., and on the other hand it is situated in the tradition that is also determined by what the first Greeks called Physis, this blooming, holding within itself a secret reserve, of which we perceive but a faint echo. Must we not understand the Earth as a mixture of History and non-History?