The modern socioeconomic and political system operates on a similar set of tacit philosophical assumptions: Things have no value in and of themselves. It is the human subject -- i.e., us -- that grants meaning to them. Without us, nothing has meaning and value. We are like Plato's Demiurge, or like Greek gods who impart meaning on everything in the universe. We possess the meaning of existence. We give it whoever or whatever we want. In our absence, the universe is nothing. It means something because we define it so.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Correlationism on Al-Arabiya
From a recent editorial on Heidegger's “Only a god can save us” by Ibrahim Kalin:
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2 comments:
This seems false. Greenspan and similar economists refer to 'the market' as a suprahuman individual, within which, it is assumed, human's should not intervene. Constitutionalism also treats the document as independent of humanity, or at least as embodying human individuals independent of our own humanity and democracy, giving democracy and freedom an objective meaning to be held against the present (the reactionary/antiquarian infatuation with origin). Given that both of these forms of thinking are specious and reified, the problem might not always be the correlate and its phantasm.
I think Kalin would counter that the market is a reified account of a specific set of human valuations: I think Pepsi will go up in value, so I buy more Pepsi shares. Just to drink Pepsi for no reason has no value: I participate in capitalist relations when my money values it for me in the store...Likewise the constitution is a reification of a set of human valuations. I think Kalin is more on your page than you suppose.
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