Meaning

Summary

Dominique Pagani thinks about meaning through the opposition between two pairs: cause-effect and sign-meaning. The first is mechanical and operates even without a subject. The second presupposes an intention and something relational, and it ought to prevail in the human sciences1. Science uncovers chains of causes, yet we live in a world of meaning and signs, and philosophy cannot leave fallow this search for meaning, which is already present in prescientific consciousness2. The world of culture or of spirit therefore belongs to meaning, which he understands as a direction, an "oriented line" toward an end. He concludes that without a subject there is neither end nor meaning: in the galaxies there are only causes, while in human beings there is also meaning3. To deny that history has a meaning amounts, in his view, to treating anyone as a thing4. He also distinguishes the sign, which is external, from meaning, which is absent and must be internalized. Finally, he criticizes the philosophy of meaning and symbol that stems from Schleiermacher. It justifies a meaning because it is lived and sets it against the concept. He would rather call it a philosophy of the sign, in which meaning slips away into a plethora of signs.

1. 1#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 37:33
2. 2#1.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?28 Jan 2016 · 41:47
3. 3Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics20 May 2022 · 51:40
4. 4#5.3 bis Questions (Facebook Live)13 Jan 2019 · 47:36

Summary produced automatically from 12 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.