Project Vision 21

In the nineteenth century, German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, wrote at the beginning of his work Patmos that, “Where danger is, salvation also grows.”

Writing about this passage, Dr. Neil Paul Cummins, of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University in England, says that, “Hölderlin’s view is clearly that from a narrow and short-term perspective danger and conflict are often the norm, but that these things actually play a part in bringing about a greater harmony in the future.”

“In the long-term they are all part of the evolution of the whole universe to perfection,” Cummins says. (See Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, 2007.)

The key words are “long term,” because, as Cummins indicates, “Cosmic evolution is thus one long process of disharmonies and inevitably following harmonies.” (Please note Cummins is talking about cosmic evolution, not biological one.)

The current economic crisis in the United States, together with political uncertainty and with unavoidable demographic changes, cause many people to pay attention only to the present, seeing just the current danger, but not the salvation.

This situation reminds me of a driver that after driving for many hours at high speed on a straight-line highway comes to a curve on a mountain and thinks the road ends there, because he is unable to look in any other direction to see the curve. Even worst, he is so used to go at high speed on a straight line that he is unable to slow down.

We are so used to enjoy a certain and constant economic growth that when our economy takes a turn, instead of slowing down and changing our lifestyle, it seems we prefer to increase our speed and fall into the abyss.

We see the real, undeniable danger, but we can’t see the salvation because our eyes are only looking short term (the current crisis) instead of long-term (the road ahead).

That change in our level of understanding needed to overcome the crisis, poetically expressed by Hölderlin and philosophically explained by Cummins, finds a new meaning in Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher. Heidegger translates Hölderlin as, “Where danger is, grows the saving power also.”

According to Heidegger, the extreme danger Hölderlin was talking about is the very essence of our technology that, in dehumanizing and reifying people, gives origin to the current capitalist and materialist system, essentially created to exploit people and nature.

The “saving power,” according to Heidegger, is the possibility that, as a reaction to the dehumanizing essence of technology and its cold and calculating “thought system,” a new system will be created where neither humankind nor nature would be labeled as mere “resources.”

From this point of view, the real risk is that, because of our obsession with the present and our lack of long-term, transcendental vision, we will now use 700 billion to rescue and perpetuate the same oppressing system that created the problem in the first place. Danger keeps growing, but not salvation.