La crisi dell’abitare. L’ethos dell’occidente

Abstract

The Crisis of Dwelling. The Ethos of the West The paper attempts to describe the fundamental features of the cultural ethos of the contemporary world, which within humanity causes the crisis of dwelling. Referring to the Heideggerian diagnostic of Weltzivilisation—as characterized by the prevalence of calculative thinking and thus by the demand of the availability of all entities—, we underline the features of thoughtlessness and emptiness of the technical civilization tied predominantly to calculation. Upon the basis of these features, one can conclude that the ethos of the current world has a banal and nihilistic character, which is linked, in a very general way, to the comprehension structure of today’s man that constitutes the way of the latter’s opening to the world and understanding of the disclosure itself. The prepositions of such a deliberation allow us to recognize that the crisis of dwelling resides, ultimately, in the crisis of thinking already indicated by Heidegger.

Keywords

• crisis of dwelling
• current cultural ethos
• calculative thinking
• weltzivilisation
• banal nihilism