The New Narratives (Ch 4, I think)

Of the five narratives that Postman puts forward, by far my favorite is the final one: Word Weavers/ World Makers.  My least favorite is the narrative of Diversity, and my reason for that will come clear as I write about how I think he goes wrong with the Word/World narrative.

Postman is, it seems, under the influence of the Anglo-American Analytic strain of philosophy.  I can see this in the way that he deals with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.   The analytic strain of philosophy dismisses some of the great names of Continental philosophy because of their connection to Nazism, or to Heidegger who was a Nazi. (This witch hunt is often lead by Richard Wolin.)   This is polemics and philosophical politics and I am disappointed to see Postman fall into that.

What Heidegger can offer to the narrative that Postman proposes is, I think, invaluable.  It is something that Dewey, Pragmatism in general and even Secular Humanism are missing.  Heidegger offers a myth that has rich and mystifying language.  Heidegger talks of Being and being-there, of the house of Being and the event, of the shepherd of Being, etc.  His later works (works written after the fall of Nazism) are poetic and often deal with poetry as much as with philosophical texts. 

What his later philosophy boils down to is that the world is organized around Being and that Being is really only a word.  (Well, that is a simple way to sum it up.)  However, with that word comes a tradition one we cannot fully understand or shake off and one that we are not in control of.  Language is not of our creation in the sense that we can control or change it, or that we can even track down where it came from, or how it came to be the way that it is.  We can redefine words, even the word that is at the center of the network of meaning, but those words still carry with them a past.  That past, that tradition, is something that we need to be aware of and we need to constantly reckon with when we ‘weave’ words and ‘make’ worlds. 

When Postman talks about diversity he brings in entropy, which I think is a very good move.  However, I think he misses the biggest point that can (and should) be taken from that move: too many variables changing at once can make it difficult, if not impossible, to stave off entropy.  To connect this to words and to Heidegger, it could be said that changing a words meaning too radically at once (or changing too many words at once) damages the tie to tradition, the heritage that made the word what it is.  When you lose that connection the word can be lost completely, or in the case of many words (or a central word like Being) the whole system can shift out of order.  Heidegger talks of slow shifts, or twisting and turning, or tarrying.  These are the ways that words, worlds and cultures need to change if they are to fight off entropy—a loss of meaning in language, a disordered world or a culture that has no unity or order. 

I could say more (AJ, you know I could write all day on this) about Heidegger and tradition, but I will stop there.  I think I made my points.  Without a respect for the tradition (which we can pick up from Heidegger’s poetic and almost mythic writings on Being from his later period) we risk losing our foundations, which really are nothing but our past.