On Aug 4 David Schenk wrote that:
>One point where we might disagree is that I do not believe it is part of
>Heidegger's philosophy that being-towards possiblitites in general should
>be grounded in discourse...
>Note that the account I'm trying to develop can work iff experience and
>cognition are fundamental and language is derivative. So none of the
>Sellarsians and Rortyians would go for this interpretation.
Since I am new to the group, I hope I am not repeating something that has
been said before.
It seems to me, David, that the Lacanian paradigm struggles with exactly
the same kinds of interpretive questions as yours as it attempts to read
(or, more correctly, re-read) Heidegger. However, whereas your discussion
seems to start with death, and the experience of death, and looks to ground
itself in language, Lacan's "Function and Field of Speech and Language"
begins with the problem of language (in response to another
re-reading--this time of Freud) and moves toward a 'grounding' in
being-for-death.
Of course, language for Lacan (always a presence made of absence) resonates
in your own description of discourse: "[T]he word or the representative
image becomes partially divorced from what it is about, and so our
understandings of things in terms of words and representations become pale
shadows of what their subject matter is really like." Language is the
symptom, rather than the cure: something we can only look out upon _from
within_. Consequently, Lacan seeks not to change _what_ we speak but,
rather, _how_ we speak, encouraging his patients to recognize that each
utterance is filled with emptiness, and that, as speaking individuals, we
are not so much free to speak as we are destined to be spoken. Filling
speech, then, with the subjective awareness of the emptiness of language
and oriented toward the only true, unmediated, experience we can
have--death--Lacanian linguistics, unlike your Sellarsians and Rortyians,
might encourage you along the way in your "philosophical convictions":
"[Language] in fact envelop[s] the life of man in a network so total that
they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to
engender him...so total that they bring to his birth...the shape of his
destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or
renegade...and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the
last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it--unless he
attain the subjective bringing to realization of being-for-death." _
Écrits_, 68.
Kind Regards,
James D. Lilley
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------
>One point where we might disagree is that I do not believe it is part of
>Heidegger's philosophy that being-towards possiblitites in general should
>be grounded in discourse...
>Note that the account I'm trying to develop can work iff experience and
>cognition are fundamental and language is derivative. So none of the
>Sellarsians and Rortyians would go for this interpretation.
Since I am new to the group, I hope I am not repeating something that has
been said before.
It seems to me, David, that the Lacanian paradigm struggles with exactly
the same kinds of interpretive questions as yours as it attempts to read
(or, more correctly, re-read) Heidegger. However, whereas your discussion
seems to start with death, and the experience of death, and looks to ground
itself in language, Lacan's "Function and Field of Speech and Language"
begins with the problem of language (in response to another
re-reading--this time of Freud) and moves toward a 'grounding' in
being-for-death.
Of course, language for Lacan (always a presence made of absence) resonates
in your own description of discourse: "[T]he word or the representative
image becomes partially divorced from what it is about, and so our
understandings of things in terms of words and representations become pale
shadows of what their subject matter is really like." Language is the
symptom, rather than the cure: something we can only look out upon _from
within_. Consequently, Lacan seeks not to change _what_ we speak but,
rather, _how_ we speak, encouraging his patients to recognize that each
utterance is filled with emptiness, and that, as speaking individuals, we
are not so much free to speak as we are destined to be spoken. Filling
speech, then, with the subjective awareness of the emptiness of language
and oriented toward the only true, unmediated, experience we can
have--death--Lacanian linguistics, unlike your Sellarsians and Rortyians,
might encourage you along the way in your "philosophical convictions":
"[Language] in fact envelop[s] the life of man in a network so total that
they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to
engender him...so total that they bring to his birth...the shape of his
destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or
renegade...and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the
last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it--unless he
attain the subjective bringing to realization of being-for-death." _
Écrits_, 68.
Kind Regards,
James D. Lilley
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------------------