The myth of meaning

People think words mean things and that they know what they mean. Both claims are often untrue. When the Government of the day talks of change, reform, choice, progress, the social contract, radical new initiatives, going forward, transparency, accountability and the like, they mean nothing. But people are expected not to realise that, and even cynics may not realise it fully. George Berkeley said: "I entreat the reader to reflect with himself, and see if it doth not often happen, either in hearing or reading a discourse, that the passions of fear, love, hatred, admiration, disdain, and the like, arise immediately in his mind upon the perception of certain words, without any ideas coming between." The whole art of politics, just as much as the art of management (qv), or of teaching subjects such as divinity or French theory, depends on this being true. But it is wrong and unkind to think that the people who use these words realise that they mean nothing. They are as much victims of the illusion as their audience. The test of whether someone is talking like this is whether you can imagine successful action based specifically on what they say. When we cannot, Berkeley's process is under way.

¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments

According to Dolores, Heidegger’s celebrated idea of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) was crucial to the practice of powder snow skiing. For great skiing to occur, according to Dolores, the skier could neither be active (imposing her will on the snowy slope), nor merely passive. Instead, the skier had to “let the mountain be.” That Heidegger himself had been a devoted skier convinced Dolores that his notion of “letting things be” was grounded in experience akin to her own.

¶ 9:45 AM 2 comments

I shall count and bury the dead.
Let their souls writhe in like dew,
Incense in my track.
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step up to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby.

P. 249

¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments

There is, as usual, a long French tradition that identifies the triumph of America with the triumph of the machine over life, but here it is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who has best expressed the anti-American view. American culture and life, “Americanism” in Heidegger’s thought, is the hideous final destination on humanity’s road away from a meaningful way of life.

¶ 7:13 AM 0 comments

Anders, born Günther Stern, attained notoriety since the early 1960s as an activist and philosopher of the antinuclear movement. An assimilated German Jew, he studied under Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, completing his dissertation in 1923. After the Adorno at the University of Frankfurt rejected his habilitation, he began work as a cultural critic. When a Berlin editor with too many writers named Stern on his staff suggested he name himself "something different," he responded "then call me 'different'" ("anders"). The name is characteristic of Anders' unsparing bluntness. He emigrated to Paris in 1933 and the United States in 1936, divorcing Hannah Arendt, who found his pessimism "hard to bear," as he later put it.

¶ 11:39 AM 0 comments

“defence” of Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism in the 1930s, and of Michel Foucault’s championing of the Iranian revolution some forty years later. Both commitments Žižek views as deeply objectionable; but in his view they were at least commitments to the need for revolutionary change, even if both Heidegger and Foucault backed the wrong horse in this respect. Behind this case lies Žižek’s indebtedness to the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom this book devotes some critically sympathetic pages. For Badiou, the good life, ethically and politically speaking, consists in a tenacious adherence to some “Event” which bursts unpredictably on the historical scene, transforms the very coordinates of human reality and refashions from top to toe the men and women who remain loyal to it.

¶ 8:53 PM 0 comments

Dr. Eduardo Zimmerman, as the reader perhaps may know, is a foreign-born historian driven from his homeland by the Third Reich and now an Argentine citizen. Of his professional work (doubtlessly estimable), I know at first hand only an article in vindication of the Semitic republic of Carthage (which posterity has judged through the writings of Roman historians, its enemies) and an essay of sorts which contends that government should function neither visibly nor by appeal to emotion. This hypothesis was thought worthy of refutation by Martin Heidegger, who proved decisively (using photocopies of newspaper headlines) that the modern head of state, far from being anonymous, is in fact the protagonistes, the khoragos, the David whose dancing (assisted by the pageantry of the stage, and with unapologetic recourse to the hyperboles of the art of rhetoric) enact the drama of his people. Heidegger likewise proved that Zimmerman was of Hebrew, not to say Jewish, descent. That article by the venerable existentialist was the immediate cause of our guest's exodus and subsequent nomadism.

Pp. 76-77

¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments

And Yegge's intellectual defense of his piece might -- might -- come across as a bit dilute.

"It's about Heidegger, Derrida -- all this stuff," he says.

¶ 8:29 AM 0 comments

Bultmann’s approach was his theory of demythologization, but this did not achieve quite the same success as his theories on form and development. If one were allowed to characterize somewhat roughly Bultmann’s solution for a contemporary appropriation of Jesus’ message, one might say that the scholar from Marburg had set up a correspondence between the nonapocalyptic-prophetic and the fundamental thought of the early Heidegger. Being a Christian, in the sense Jesus meant it, is essentially collapsed into that mode of existing in openness and alertness which Heidegger described. The question has to occur whether one cannot come by some simpler way to such general and sweeping formal assertions.

¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments

Among other groups we will have a small crowd of philosophers carrying on a debate on the subject of the language specificity of philosophy instigated by Heidegger's well known remark that among modern languages only German is suitable for philosophy. Some lindy hopper, some bonsais and some cheerleaders will add to our heterogeneity.

¶ 7:46 PM 0 comments

[E]ach violent movement of the film is posed as a poetic moment in Heidegger’s sense of the term, an eruption of the possibility of transcendence in a world that has lost its potential for meaning and direction.

And this is not to say that Malick understands violence as poetry or transcendence. That is, unfortunately, fair to say of Peckinpah. But that Malick has taken the Starkweather myth and understood it in Heidegger’s terms.

¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments

So, where is the lesson, in all of this, for happiness and fulfilment? It lies in the realisation, usually only discovered through sometimes painful experience, that to be truly happy one has to learn how to “balance” or negotiate “thrownness”, “projection” and “falling” in one’s own life. These principles apply to every human being, but their specific “content” (for want of a better word) differs from one person to the other.

¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments

As early as in the 1930s, Martin Heidegger talked about the enchantment of modern times. Contemporary human beings are bewitched by technology and its constant advancements. Yes, they are obsessed with the conviction that everything must surely be calculable, usable and made manageable.

Yet Heidegger's line of thought appears to be unfulfilled, seeing as it is sprung from a, for him, typical reluctance towards exact science and technical calculation. The concept may, however, be valuable even without this programmatically negative stance. The enchantment of modernity lies in the actual concept of progress as such.

¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects;
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry
Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty,
Looking awry upon your lord's departure,
Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail;
Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows
Of what it is not.

Shakespeare

¶ 8:07 PM 0 comments

When the book was published, Lacan sent a signed copy of the book to Martin Heidegger. It would seem that Heidegger was not impressed, given that he wrote in a letter to Medard Boss: “You too have no doubt received Lacan’s large tome. Personally, I haven’t so far been able to get anything at all out of this obviously outlandish text.” Heidegger wrote again a few months later: “It seems to me that the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist”.

¶ 12:03 PM 0 comments

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: “True and false are attributes of speech, not of things.” That is, judgments of truth or falsehood are made relative to the forms of predication that have been established in public/institutional discourse. When we pronounce a judgment — this is true or that is false — the authorization for that judgment comes from those forms (Hobbes calls them “settled significations”) and not from the world speaking for itself.

¶ 10:13 PM 0 comments

Ilan and Jacob were both at least twenty years older than me, and they called themselves philosophers, although only Jacob seemed to have an actual academic position, and maybe a tenuous one, I couldn’t quite tell. I was happy not to care about those things. Jacob had a wife and daughter, too, though I never met them. It was always just the three of us. We would get together and Ilan would go on about Heidegger and “thrownness,” or about Will Ferrell, and Jacob would come up with some way to disagree, and I would mostly just listen, and eat baklava and drink lots of coffee.

¶ 12:59 PM 0 comments