Illustration by Andrzej KrauzeIt was at a point when linguistics, cultural anthropology and continental philosophy were converging that philosopher Martin Heidegger proclaimed ‘language is the house of the truth of being.’ The problem at hand was conceiving the role of language in an experiential (phenomenological) sense that closed the distance between the Western inheritance of Cartesian dualism, and with it the need for ‘transcendence,’ and the world.
As abstruse as this probably reads, the political, economic and cultural subtexts of Western modernity: social control, economic concentration and commodification of the social realm, tie through the all-purpose apologia of neoliberal capitalism to shared premises about the structure and nature of the world. What then is to be done regarding the colloquialism ‘don’t shit where you eat’ when the world is home.
Image: Oceanic ‘dead zones’ where climate change, industrial pollution and agricultural runoff, have depleted oxygen levels to the point where nothing lives, surround the U.S., developed Europe, Britain and Japan. The common link is capitalism. One would think the term ‘dead zones’ would cause reconsideration on the part of those causing them. What relationship with the world explains treating it is a garbage dump?
At the nexus of linguistics and cultural anthropology is the otherwise banal observation that different peoples approach ‘the world’ differently. The Western, predominantly Platonic / Cartesian, conception of ‘the world’ as an external object has rough corollary in the astrophysicist’s distinction between the ‘big bang’ as expansion of, rather than in, space. In the prior conception there is no dimension in which to put space. Allow for a moment that this problem of dimensionality applies to key conceits of the Western worldview.
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