“Let it be”

“Let it be”—it's the language of Paul McCartney but it's also the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Being lets things be. Poetry gives us unique access to this letting-be quality of Being.

Cue a thousand environmental maxims, poems, views. (For a good intro, see my colleague Louise Economides's essay online.)

Something is so right about it. But something feels so wrong as well.

For example--what do we let be? When letting-be becomes a political question, the Being really hits the fan.

Do we let Exxon be? Do we let global warming be? Do we let the sixth mass extinction event (for which we ourselves are responsible) be?

There are Heideggerians who seriously suggest this. Any kind of intervention into the substance of reality is seen as yet another inevitably failed attempt to not let be.

What I've read of them recently convinces me more than ever that the ideological language of immersion in the lifeworld—profoundly environmentalist language, derived from Heidegger—is complicit with current social and ecological conditions.

This sounds counterintuitive, but it's no different than driving past what looks like two separate buildings that turn out to be part of the same structure, a kind of parallax.

Insisting on our embeddedness (like Iraq War reporters) in the “world” is—shocking thought—part of the problem.