Abstract

I use Heidegger's critique of Rilke's solution to the technological objectification of nature to help determine whether Heidegger's own view of nature hinders his attempt to overcome subject-object dualism. For both Heidegger and Rilke, in order to change our relationship to natural entities we must do more than redefine our conception of nature. The subject-object dynamic must be transformed by reconfiguring the relation between entities, humans, and being. ;Heidegger follows a list of key words through Rilke's poetry: "relation," "venture," "departure," "open," "life," "earth," "nature," and "angel." I use these same words to explicate Heidegger's own understanding of the relation between humans and entities during his turn away from the anthropocentrism of Being and Time. I primarily focus on the role given to natural entities in the new configuration of being set forth in the Beitrage zur Philosophie, the major, but unpublished, project of this transitional period. ;I argue that Heidegger's understanding of nature, earth, and technology in the Beitrage prevents him from decentering the human subject as the privileged site of being. Heidegger attempts to decenter Dasein by critiquing the effectiveness of human action, but he does not allow for the possibility that natural entities can exert an ontological or ethical pull on us. Heidegger maintains an ontological division between nature and humans, which results in an unbridgeable gap between subject and object, and in an essentially Dasein-centered world. ;In the concluding chapter I sketch out a way in which Heidegger's desire for a non-Dasein-centered understanding of being can be reconciled with his sometimes justified fears of naturalism, by reevaluating his understanding of history .History is not to be understood as a "sending of Being" whose recipient is Da-sein, but as a "gathering layering" . This understanding of history makes room for a natural dimension to Being, and no longer requires that the historical be defined in opposition to the natural