Speaker 1: Mahn and he brings up all these obscure texts that
Speaker 1: I'm like, I haven't read this. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're talking about. What is reference?
Speaker 2: Yeah, as much as I love the guy, this is
Speaker 2: why we haven't covered him. He's actually terrible for podcast forum.
Speaker 3: He's the worst name dropper fucking ever. Man, He's always
Speaker 3: name drop and who the hell's kangy Am? I'm sure
Speaker 3: that name is bouncing around in the Ecole Superior are
Speaker 3: in the mid century, But come on, dry up. People
Speaker 3: are gonna read you for more than ten fucking years
Speaker 3: in different languages, so maybe you should. No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 3: I can't say that shit.
Speaker 2: That's why I know that's I mean, I agree with you.
Speaker 2: He has read fucking everything he was. Half of the
Speaker 2: names are not even people I've heard of.
Speaker 3: But then again, it's always those fundamental moves that are
Speaker 3: being put into question in Dary does texts, so you
Speaker 3: can't what is contextuality? Like, is there a difference between
Speaker 3: text and context? Is the context somehow outside of the
Speaker 3: text and determines the meaning of the text, Like we
Speaker 3: just say about language, you know, like, how do I
Speaker 3: know what that word means?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 3: By the context, the words around it. Okay, fine, what
Speaker 3: about those words?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 3: How do I know what they mean? Further context? Like
Speaker 3: he puts those sorts of things into question, that leads
Speaker 3: you down those sometimes frustrating thought loops. And then you
Speaker 3: get pissed off and throw the text away. And then
Speaker 3: you have a dream and realize you read something beautiful
Speaker 3: and go back and then remember that it was in
Speaker 3: daridawn and you go fuck, And then you got to
Speaker 3: read Darida again. An example of my frustration and the
Speaker 3: beauty of his work. Right, Yeah, it's poetic, is what
Speaker 3: is it? That is to say? It is very poetic,
Speaker 3: and this text is in a way all about poetry.
Speaker 3: He involves a lot of Aristotle's poetics. It involves talking
Speaker 3: about metaphor. It involves talking about the difference between what
Speaker 3: is a metaphor and what is a concept. Concepts are
Speaker 3: supposed to be truthful things that science uses. Metaphors are
Speaker 3: supposed to be flower figurative things that poets use. How
Speaker 3: could they possibly not be super distinct? All the philosophers
Speaker 3: he brings up, I have these very precise distinctions between
Speaker 3: metaphors and other modes of expression. But Darida is gonna
Speaker 3: do his thing and question that question the possibility of
Speaker 3: making those clean distinctions between metaphors and concepts.
Speaker 1: Right, because language is metaphorical, like everywhere they.
Speaker 3: Went through top to bottom, front to back. Baby.
Speaker 2: But I'll just read the first paragraph just we have
Speaker 2: a little bit of flavor, because I know that even
Speaker 2: though I demanded that the listeners do their homework, I don't.
Speaker 4: Expect them to. They have lives.
Speaker 2: So uh, first on the obverse is what the opening
Speaker 2: is called philosophy dot dot dot and from philosophy read
Speaker 2: it from a book roughly and more or less a
Speaker 2: book to create a flower, and to create it here,
Speaker 2: to bring it forth to mount it, rather to let
Speaker 2: it mount and find its dawning and turns aside as
Speaker 2: though of itself revoluted some grave flower following the reckoning
Speaker 2: of a lapidary. We learn to cultivate patients. So in that,
Speaker 2: in the spirit of this, we are going to be
Speaker 2: cultivating some patients, we can get to overall themes. I
Speaker 2: think Eric opened it up there. My my summary of.
Speaker 1: This, what did that even just mean? What you just said?
Speaker 1: That first thing, like the f.
Speaker 4: Good question, good place to start.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a joke because he's talking about the flower,
Speaker 2: and he brings up later in the essay the florid
Speaker 2: piece of language, because philosophers say, we're not going to
Speaker 2: use florid language, We're going to use true language.
Speaker 4: So he's a he's bringing he's.
Speaker 2: Talking about this flower, and then we see him go
Speaker 2: in on two ways because you can't ever be sure
Speaker 2: of what he's saying, because sometimes he says something or
Speaker 2: brings up an author like Anatole France, only to shut
Speaker 2: it down and say, but that's not what I mean
Speaker 2: at all. So if you're looking at this reader, listener,
Speaker 2: I mean, uh, there's these giant, basically page long quotations
Speaker 2: taken from novels, taken from so sur a bunch of sources,
Speaker 2: and they're the font size this is kind of frustrating.
Speaker 2: The font size on the giant block quotations is eleven
Speaker 2: and the rest of the font size is twelve.
Speaker 3: It's twelve. Yeah, they're hearts to tell apart.
Speaker 4: So they're very hard to tell apart.
Speaker 2: And if you are like citing this, make sure that
Speaker 2: you are finding out who's actually speaking on the page,
Speaker 2: because these these these quotations last for entire pages.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah, and I noticed that. And they're like
Speaker 1: you just said they're like barely different fonts.
Speaker 4: They're like yeah, they're like it's like a half a
Speaker 4: size different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's like what it's like the regular texts
Speaker 1: twelve point font and the quotes are like eleven and
Speaker 1: you're just like, oh wait shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of a kind of ableists. They're looking at
Speaker 3: looking ahead a bit. That that flower thing you mentioned. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know, I might be wrong about this, but eventually
Speaker 3: he's gonna talk about the sun, right, the sun as
Speaker 3: one of those in scare quotes foundational metaphors in Western
Speaker 3: philosophy and the sun, you know, so you get these
Speaker 3: playful connections, right, A metaphor is a trope? What is
Speaker 3: a flower it looks towards the sun? What do we
Speaker 3: call that heliotropic? What is the original metaphor in the
Speaker 3: Western tradition? The sun? You know, the light of reason,
Speaker 3: the obscure and the clear, the dark and the than
Speaker 3: the bright, you know, all those things like those are
Speaker 3: all very very deep metaphors in philosophy that have supposedly,
Speaker 3: as we'll learn in this section, you know, metaphors are
Speaker 3: at least we're gonna think with the idea that for
Speaker 3: a bit that metaphors are coins that have had like this,
Speaker 3: one of the sides rubbed off of them, the side
Speaker 3: that has like a figure on it, the sensible part.
Speaker 3: It's been rubbed off by use, by usage, right, these metaphysicians,
Speaker 3: and they take their coins and they rub them down
Speaker 3: so that they're super you know, at they look abstract
Speaker 3: and like they don't have any original sense reference to them.
Speaker 3: But yeah, he comes and points out the sun later
Speaker 3: is like that too, and that's like at the heart
Speaker 3: of Aristotle's texts is like the sun, and Plato obviously
Speaker 3: too with the cave thing. Right, the sun is like
Speaker 3: the er fucking metaphor in philosophy. And he shows that
Speaker 3: it's just that it's a it's a metaphor. It has
Speaker 3: this like unsensible sensibleness because you can't look straight at
Speaker 3: the sun but you see it's light all the time.
Speaker 3: Like it has the same problems as any other metaphor does.
Speaker 3: And uh, well, that's just that's jumping the gun. Sometimes
Speaker 3: with Daridell, you got to bury the lead. Sometimes you
Speaker 3: got to jump the gun. That's the only way to
Speaker 3: do it. But yeah, that's coming.
Speaker 4: All right, all right, all right, slow down there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the sun is the truth obviously in Western philosophy,
Speaker 2: and the way we understand truth is by analogy with
Speaker 2: the son. You don't you can't look straight at it,
Speaker 2: you can never see it directly, but only because of
Speaker 2: it can you see other things. So it's the analogy
Speaker 2: is because the truth is, then we can have all
Speaker 2: these other pieces of truth. We can use perception and
Speaker 2: get a part of the truth. We can use math
Speaker 2: and science and get other parts of the truth that's
Speaker 2: not Deredi's position. That is what the Western metaphysics generally is.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you guys noticed, but this thing
Speaker 2: is I believe this isn't just a sneak diss at Heidegger.
Speaker 4: Everything in here is against Heidegger, is it?
Speaker 3: I thought he I thought he got so much out
Speaker 3: of Hideger, like like when I he did. But when
Speaker 3: you watches that documentary on Darida, he kind of he
Speaker 3: points to his library. Its like, Heidigger's the only thing
Speaker 3: I've read carefully here. I think he says something like that. Anyway,
Speaker 3: he's not. He's like, obviously he's very very well read,
Speaker 3: but like Heidegger seemed to be the thing he reads
Speaker 3: with the most care. And husserl, I guess too.
Speaker 4: That's absolutely true.
Speaker 2: But if you remember, there's a essay he wrote something
Speaker 2: like history and Heidiger something to that point, and he
Speaker 2: says like Heidiger tried to not be an onto theologian,
Speaker 2: but he ended up just falling right back into ato theology.
Speaker 2: So when he's talking about these etymology the etymology games
Speaker 2: finding out where words came from and then pointing it
Speaker 2: and say like this is the true meaning, we've lost
Speaker 2: the true meaning.
Speaker 4: You know, you can hear the echoes of Hiderger.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: We've lost the true meaning of beaning because we have
Speaker 2: lost the true meanings of these terms. Originally, Darida just
Speaker 2: picks that up and shits all over it. But we're
Speaker 2: getting ahead of ourselves. I'd like to start with the
Speaker 2: opening gambit, and that's this.
Speaker 4: Thing with coins.
Speaker 2: The first three vignettes are so Sir Nietzsche and a
Speaker 2: character from a novel by Anatole France whose name is Polyphilos,
Speaker 2: and they all make the same metaphor, so I'll try
Speaker 2: to I'm not gonna do the deconstruction first. I'll present
Speaker 2: to you what they present First, we have original language
Speaker 2: language in its home language that has to do with
Speaker 2: phenomenology to drop that in there, physical stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: like our word for our word for truth in English,
Speaker 2: the Latins veritas. But in English truth comes from the
Speaker 2: word for oak tree. So what's the what's the metaphorphorization
Speaker 2: there is? We need to compare it to something solid,
Speaker 2: So we find the most solid thing around or whatever
Speaker 2: our angle Anglo Saxon ancestors did and say, all.
Speaker 4: Right, we got we got oak.
Speaker 2: We're gonna call truth and compare it to oak, because
Speaker 2: truth is solid, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not as much sun up there as there was
Speaker 3: in ancient Greece.
Speaker 2: I guess the Greeks did the sign and our answer
Speaker 2: us there did the trees and the mountains.
Speaker 3: We yet igdrasil the world tree instead of the sun.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: I actually don't know if the word.
Speaker 2: Drew like drewid is that might be Celtic instead of
Speaker 2: Anglo Saxon. But anyway, I think so getting caught up
Speaker 2: on it all, the all three of these guys Anatole France,
Speaker 2: so Sir and Nietzsche make the metaphor of metaphor, which
Speaker 2: is a coin and the coin.
Speaker 4: First of all, it has.
Speaker 2: Its location in time and space, you know, because a
Speaker 2: coin has the name of the country or the name
Speaker 2: of the king or whoever I'm on it, which gives
Speaker 2: it a physical location in space and time over time.
Speaker 2: This is anatole France's character's description of what happens over time.
Speaker 2: With a word like drew, which means oak, it gets
Speaker 2: the surface gets sanded off, the location at a specific
Speaker 2: time and place in a language, in a country. This
Speaker 2: gets stand it off, and we're ended that we end
Speaker 2: up with something extremely abstract like truth.
Speaker 4: Truth is.
Speaker 2: Truth originates in the physical, real, sensible, normal world, and eventually,
Speaker 2: by the time it gets to us, it's this you know,
Speaker 2: cosmic religious, fleeting entity that has all of being in
Speaker 2: it and yet is nowhere kind of thing.
Speaker 4: So we start from a coin. The coin gets effaced
Speaker 4: by knife grinders over time. And this is why Nietzsche,
Speaker 4: so sir, and this character.
Speaker 2: In the novel, they're all against metaphysics, and Hegel gets
Speaker 2: called out here. For example, specifically, Hegel uses terms like
Speaker 2: absolute and infinite. These are not even positive terms. They're
Speaker 2: just negative.
Speaker 3: Terms, negative concepts.
Speaker 4: Nothing that exists.
Speaker 2: So that's the opening argument is that metaphysics are just
Speaker 2: coins that have the inscriptions sand it off, which which
Speaker 2: is you know, very cool, very good, and there's truth
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that the coin, the coin metaphor is very dominant.
Speaker 4: And here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, then then when you're not just using like you know,
Speaker 3: words or like coins or symbols or like coins, you
Speaker 3: can exchange them for whatever you want kind of thing here,
Speaker 3: then they become like the metaphor of metaphors.
Speaker 2: But the idea is right again, we have an original meaning,
Speaker 2: original meaning with a functional value of functional utility, and
Speaker 2: over time it becomes abstracted. Now this is something that
Speaker 2: we can observe. But Darida is not going to use
Speaker 2: this as his explanation. So if you if you cite
Speaker 2: anything from the first fourteen pages, then he pulls a
Speaker 2: one eighty and goes, but we're not gonna We're not.
Speaker 4: That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3: He problematizes, Okay, metaphor in the text of philosophy. He
Speaker 3: like basically just says the title right away, and it's
Speaker 3: kind of like this, this is the topic metaphor in
Speaker 3: the text of philosophy. But then Daridad does his thing,
Speaker 3: you know it as do we really understand what this means, like,
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm getting this point of Yeah, philosophical
Speaker 3: language depends on metaphor. It's metaphorical top to bottom. But
Speaker 3: the point about ordinary language, Okay, maybe that's what he
Speaker 3: means here is that you know, this poliphialos guy is
Speaker 3: going to start thinking about these words that have this
Speaker 3: ordinary meaning.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: It was very closely connected to the original sense experience. Right,
Speaker 3: you see something with four legs, and it's furry, and
Speaker 3: it barks and it licks you when you try to
Speaker 3: pet it. Whatever. You call that thing a dog? You
Speaker 3: have this, you call that thing a dog. Right, it's
Speaker 3: a sensible there's a sensible image the figure. Right, But
Speaker 3: over time that figurative sensible meaning is what gets rubbed off. Right,
Speaker 3: so suddenly I can say, like, you know, you're a dog,
Speaker 3: or like someone you say this this that man is
Speaker 3: a pig, right to mean he's lecherous. Rights has nothing
Speaker 3: to do with the original meaning.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: We think we know, you know, oh, pigs kind of
Speaker 3: roll around in dirt, But then science tells us they're
Speaker 3: actually very clean animals and actually genetically very close to us,
Speaker 3: and we can use their organs for transplants sometimes. Okay,
Speaker 3: all that, but we can still call someone a pig
Speaker 3: and mean they're lecherous, right that that original sensible image
Speaker 3: we encounter. This is almost like, very close to Nietzsche's
Speaker 3: argument in in the beginning of on Truth and Lives
Speaker 3: in a non moral sense, he says, you know, the
Speaker 3: first metaphor this, the nervous sensation is transformed into an image,
Speaker 3: and then the image is transformed into a concept. Second metaphor, right,
Speaker 3: and the and the and the concepts. Originally then they
Speaker 3: just they lose their connection with original sensible experience, and
Speaker 3: we perceive that as being generalized. Right, Oh, they have
Speaker 3: this general value. Now we can use things like the
Speaker 3: word truth to mean so many different things because it
Speaker 3: has no sensible figurative ground anymore. It's been rubbed off.
Speaker 2: Well, A good example is the term infinite, because especially
Speaker 2: in Christian theology, we have this term infinite applied to God,
Speaker 2: eternal applied to God. These are negatives, right, There's nothing
Speaker 2: that you can point to that's infinite. There's nothing you
Speaker 2: can point to eternal. You just look at something in
Speaker 2: time and go, well, God's the opposite of that, or
Speaker 2: infinite like a not just used by Christianity but by Hagel,
Speaker 2: not finite. We only know finite things. But I'm talking
Speaker 2: about this other thing.