War and Development

Abstract

Western understanding of Being, according to Heidegger’s history of Being, has been coloured in the late modern era by the ontotheological essence of technology, enframing, which is the way humans understand all beings in terms of their resourcefulness for use. The dominant understanding of development as modernization, on the other hand, can be seen as concretizing the essence of technology in the global south since the second half of the twentieth century. There is a warlike movement in the unfolding of technological understanding, which manifests itself in development as the seeking of national power through militarization, taming of the forces of nature and living beings and overcoming the existential strife that is native to the human condition. Faced with the event of the dominant ontological manifestation of Being as producible material in the modern age, however, humanity is not irredeemably fated with a single understanding of what-is, for possibilities of subverting the warlike unfolding of the essence of technology in its manifestation as speedily modernizing development are available.