ABSTRACT
At the beginning of this book we visited Martin Heidegger. He was looking at photographs of the earth and trying to understand what they portended. The image of the confused and worried Heidegger has run through this book. I have used the image as a way of teasing out some of the debates, and the implications of the debates, about what it means to be human in this world. I have been trying to develop an interpretation of our human condition; of the relationships and experiences of our being in the world. I have also been talking around the rather thorny problem of whether it is actually viable to uphold some notion of the human condition. For me the main problem is that there seem to be few persuasive sociological reasons to uphold a concept of the human condition, yet without it critical and moral discourses seem to become immensely tenuous. Without some almost transcendental concept of humanity and its condition, contemplation cannot possibly go very far beyond a simple registration and repetition of the arrangements of the everyday. But it is precisely that transcendental subject which seems to be quite improbable. Equally, even though it might not be the case that we all share Heidegger’s concerns in the face of the photographs (for some people, photographs of the earth are quite beautiful and not at all disturbing; for other people the photographs are so familiar that they mean next to nothing), I think it is reasonable to suggest that Heidegger’s concerns cut to the quick of who we are, who we might be, who we might be able to want to be.
