Few of those who offer totalizing criticisms of contemporary places go as far as does Heidegger in his history of being and his analyses of the technological essence of modernity. He claims that the conditions which give us a meaningful world also bring changes in our total background of meaning. This happens without any contribution from social or psychological processes, which are given meaning by these changes rather than controlling them. (See the essays collected in Heidegger 1971 and 1977, as well as the interview, Heidegger 1981) His argument is difficult to sustain in its extreme form, but some such combination of transcendental necessity and empirical diagnosis makes a very alluring strategy for totalizing critiques.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001