Nietzsche And Heidegger On Meaning: Inferences For The Era Of The Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Nietzsche points out that the noble taste of Greek lost its place to dialectic after Socrates, and thus, human beings lost their connection to their nature. After Socrates, through the exclusive use of conscious and logical language, the meaning became fixated in our society and we lost our connection to the dynamism in nature. Considering representations as meanings, in the Heideggerian sense, it should be noted that a represented object always implies a level of existence that is not limited to that representation but points to a Being of that representation. For Heidegger, in line with Nietzsche, however, there is a switch during the Hellenistic period from the understanding of “sign” as "showing for showing" to “sign” as an instrument to "designate", and that switch leads to the creation of representations between sign and its signified (hence the term "designation" with the focus instead on the signified). In today's neoliberal world, similarly, people are lost in and through representations (and even they become a representation to be consumed) and, in this way, lost in an inauthentic way of living. It is, then, not expected for the Covid-19 pandemic to lead us to the authentic way of living because the anxiety around it would be translated into fear, which is an inauthentic way of experiencing anxiety. As a solution, we should reinvent the language where the instinctual language of the real of our bodies and will would prevent the logical language from resulting in the fixation of meaning and representation.