At 12:55 26/06/01 +1000, you wrote:
>I refer to the interesting comments by Garry MacLennan on reading
>photographs and documentary film in terms of Heidegger's concept of
>alethia. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't alethia related to the
>unconcealing of being , and not to meaning and representation? If so, then
>photographic images need to be seen other than as conveyers of truth about
>the social and political world. Alethia is bound up in the appearance of
>something as a techno-ontological achievement: it is this achievement that
>needs to be sorted out, and not the adequation of the appearance to its
>'originary' event.
Hi Warwick,
Greetings to CQU from QUT! One of the advantages of reading and writing
about Heidegger, is that it is very difficult to be accused of
misreading! For what it is worth I think the central problem is that he
never defines Being! He does resort to tautology in 'Sein ist Sein' but
that leaves me at least little better off.
Now you distinguish Being from meaning and representation. That still
leaves open the nature of their relationship. One way of articulating this
relationship is to see Being as lying beyond meaning and representation -
outside the text as it were. A thing in itself which the text allows us
access to. Bhaskar in his Realist Theory of Science has something like this
in his distinction between the intransitive dimension (ontological) and the
transitive (epistemological) dimensions.
Of course post-structuralist thought will have nothing of this. But that
is an old battle and I am much more interested in synthesising than in
taking rigidly oppositional positions. That means I am trying to figure out
a way to link up Bhaskar's notion of alethia, truth as the reason for
things and Heidegger's aletheia, which I interpret as truth as revelation.
I am especially intrigued by how one could apply to documentary theory the
later Bhaskar where he seems to be moving towards the situation where Being
permeates meaning & representation.
regards
Gary
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