Mean­ing­ful Searches, Exits and Traps

Posted on: February 1, 2009

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The (Post-)Modern Search for Meaning:

Tolstoy’s Escape from the Trap

 

A Reflec­tion by Sean Howard

 

For the last few years, a close friend has been com­plain­ing, with light touch but increas­ingly heavy heart, of a deep-​​​​seated cre­ative malaise, an impasse in his search for an authen­tic voice and mes­sage. Among other sources, his depres­sion can be traced to his intense and aca­d­e­m­i­cally accom­plished engage­ment with Wittgen­stein, whose hum­bling exposé of the ‘lan­guage game’  –  and, there­with, what my friend calls “capital-​​​​P Philosophy”  –  leaves him both full of admi­ra­tion and “with every­thing  –  and noth­ing  –  to say”. Or, rather, with a desire to say ‘some­thing true’ thwarted by sen­si­tiv­ity to the unre­al­iz­able nature of any such (language-​​​​based) project. Behind this block­age, we both sus­pect, lurks the Niet­zschean dis­so­lu­tion of, indis­sev­er­ably, our union with God and God’s with the Word. ‘The Word is dead,…

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The Per­ils of Binary Thinking

Posted on: July 10, 2008

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Fri­day, March 28th, 2008

Another way of say­ing “binary think­ing” is “dual­is­tic think­ing.” It’s become some­thing of a cliché in post­moder­nity to decry “west­ern dual­ism,” so I’m going to avoid the phrase to stave off my own bore­dom and per­haps make a more trenchant point.

I’ve noticed that North Amer­i­cans are ter­ri­ble about see­ing things in (cliché again) “black” and “white”, good or bad, this or that. To some extent, just to use ordi­nary con­ver­sa­tional eng­lish you have to employ antonyms but that’s not what I’m talk­ing about. Some­how for Northams (I’m not going to use the term Amer­i­cans b/​​c of course that includes our friends in Canada and Latin Amer­ica, and I’m not talk­ing about them in this cri­tique, mainly because I have lit­tle knowl­edge of whether they tend to see things the same way, but I sus­pect not… ) we hypo­sta­tize all of our dualisms into Manichean cos­mo­log­i­cal strug­gles. So you’re left wing or…

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