#k debate

[kdebate]

how to know you're a k debater #3

the order "2-off" makes every judge groan. they know it's t and the k. it's always t and the k.

[kdebate]

how to know you're a k debater #1

the first thing your judge says to you after sitting down in the room is “if you go 1 off queer terror you’re getting a 26.5”

[kdebate]

when all the other 2As are assigning answers to politics

[kdebate]

hey um not trying to be rude or anything but could you like... stop telling me to quit policy debate because i run a k aff? haha cool thanks

[fuckyeahpolicydebate]

[usefuldebatecards]

Ok so I've been hitting Heidegger K's everywhere, and I almost always lose on that because I don't understand it enough. Can you just give me a brief overview of what his philosophy is about?

So there are a couple ways to run a Heideggerian critique inside the debate space. The way it tends to be run the most often is a critique of the way we enframe ourselves in the world using technology.

To understand what that means you have to understand a little bit about the background inside Heideggerian thought. To make a long story short Heidegger wanted to take philosophy back to its roots and come to an understanding of how we approach the world, and what everything means, from scratch. The problem he found with philosophy as it stood was that it asked a lot of questions about what it meant to be something but the question of what it meant to be was never asked. This meant that the way that people could only understand the world through other things, most especially technology and the way we come to understand the world through the products and tools 'we' make.

A way imagine this, and it's trite and overused but bear with me, is a window frame. When you look at the world through a window all you can see is what is inside the window frame. Whatever is outside the window gets left out of your understanding of the world at that moment (in this analogy: whatever doesn't fit into our understanding of the world through technology, nationalism, etc.) and, perhaps more importantly, everything inside the frame gets understood in terms of that window. When it comes to technology in specific it means that everything we come to find in the world becomes seen as another piece of technology to use, to exploit, and to be made valuable and never as something, or someone, who exists in their own right. This is what the phrase standing reserve means, everything becomes something that stands around in wait (reserve) for us to come use it, like a gas pump[/cliche].

There are a couple of impacts to this. The biggest one is usually that turning the world into a standing reserve makes life controllable  and causes a slew of bad things to happen to the life we imagine controlling, see: Dillon 99. The second level question is that if they can prove that your view of the world is enframed in a problematic way then all of your conclusions, even if they seem logical from your standpoint, are flawed. This means in a debate sense not only do they get an impact but you don't get anything to weigh against them unless you can win that the way you understand operating in the the world is good.

Before I go on there are two things to make clear. First, this is a simple explanation of Heidegger in debate. I'm leaving out a lot of other things like the question of calculability, technology vs. technological thought, to say even less of the overly analyzed question of the 'dasein'. These are discussions to have with your coach, with other judges, and to read about. Second, Heidegger's actual writing is much more complicated than debate Heidegger. He wrote very extensively and in a very detailed and tortuous way, and cannot simply be summarized in a nine minute speech (or a quick tumblr post). Arguably, and this is according to Heidegger, we can't even understand him properly because we are discussing him in English and not German. His thoughts on language, translation, and understanding being very complex. 

So, next. How to answer him?

There are a number of ways, and I'll give three:

First, Heidegger was a Nazi. I don't mean this in the sense that he was a touch unsavory in his political beliefs. I mean this in that there are pictures of him with an armband with a swastika on it making the Nazi salute, that he worked as a rector for a German University when the Nazis were in power, and he wrote a bunch of speeches praising Hitler. Now there are two ways to make this argument. One is to say "Heidegger was a Nazi and evil!", this is a stupid argument, and if you don't know why google 'ad hominem'. The second is to discuss how trying to break down and overcome the way we understand the world leads to 'revolutionary' politics like Nazism where we lose touch with our effect on the world in the revolutionary moment. This leads to a productive discussion and you can find a number of philosophers discussing this in a variety of ways.

The second is that this quest for a perfect understanding of the world before action justifies paralysis that leads to direct harms in the world. It's a simple argument to make, and true. The longer we sit around and navel gaze the harder it gets to reverse global warming and the more people die from poverty. The Schatz 12 article which I posted a card from before makes this claim directly in it and deserves to be read and cut. 

Third, Heidegger was anthropocentric out the wazoo. He viewed the world as a thing to be understood by humans, while animals were 'poor-in-the-world' and as things that were always second to human interests and could only be understood by humanity. Cut a couple links and add them to your anthro file and you've got some great turns.

[fuckyeahpolicydebate]

[fuckyeahpolicydebate]

RIP 2012 Kritik