Martin Heidegger said “beings exist only in human understanding”, and I’ve been really pondering that this week. Is he implying that if we took ourselves out of the map everything else would not be go on relating and having their own connections without us? The dog would no longer have legal rights for there would be no humans to make and enforce them. I guess a whole ton of ‘relation lines’ would disappear because we are no longer there to relate to things. Does that mean that other things need us to be connected to another thing? Do objects need us to be the middle man?
Eg. The dog has a line drawn linking it to the dog park. But that relation is only made possible because we exist and we bring the dog to it. If we weren’t in it, the dog would never have a relation with the dog park?
But then Bogost goes on to reject correlationism to say that we are a necessary chain, but that we are not the centre or beginning or end of it?