Abstract
Proposals to respond to climate change by geoengineering the Earth’s climate system, such as by regulating the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, may be seen as a radical fulfillment of Heidegger’s understanding of technology as destiny. Before geoengineering was conceivable, the Earth as a whole had to be representable as a total object, an object captured in climate models that form the epistemological basis for climate engineering. Geoengineering is thinkable because of the ever-tightening grip of Enframing, Heidegger’s term for the modern epoch of Being.
Yet, by objectifying the world as a whole, geoengineering goes beyond the mere representation of nature as ‘standing reserve’; it requires us to think Heidegger further, to see technology as a response to disorder breaking through. If in the climate crisis nature reveals itself to be a sovereign force then we need a phenomenology from nature’s point of view. If ‘world grounds itself on earth, and earth juts through world’, then the climate crisis is the jutting through, and geoengineering is a last attempt to deny it, a vain attempt to take control of destiny rather than enter a free relation with technology. In that lies the danger.