I have been perusing an old book by Simon Blackburn called Spreading the Word. In it, Blackburn has a very helpful little section describing the relationship between mind, language, and the world in the form of a triangle the corners of which are connected to one another by theories. The mind corner is connect to the world by a theory of knowledge and connected to the language corner by a theory of meaning. The world corner is connected to the language corner by a theory of truth. The idea is that one chooses a corner from which to develop theories for the sides. The task then becomes ensuring that one’s corner contains…
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- 9/11, Conversion, Gnosticism, Jeffrey Satinover, Knowledge, Marxism, Materialism, Slavoj Žižek, Speaking of Terror Part 4, Terror
Speaking of Terror – Part IV
How can we know what is real? In the wake of 9/11 many philosophers offered interpretations of the event from their own perspective of reality. Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, claimed that 9/11 was an event which woke America up. America, he wrote, has been awakened, like Neo in The Matrix to, using the phrase Morpheus used, “the desert of the real.” Americans, Žižek argued, were, before 9/11, like Truman in the movie, The Truman Show1 – living in “the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise…in its very hyper-reality, in a way ireal, substances, deprived of the material inertia.”2 According to Žižek, the attacks on America burst the bubble of unreality and…