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Truth, Translation and Myth: essay on Truth and its

anthropomorphic narrative
Lucas R. Vollet
Abstract:
In this article we will discuss the relationships that literature,
mythological narrative and translation have with the creation of
meaning and reformulation of the structural margins of language.
We will suggest the hypothesis that the differentiation strategies
used to express and to read a meaning involve control over 1. The
aspect of inflation caused by interpretation 2. The corruption of the
coding center of language, 3. The initiative that breaks the silence
built by the historical inertia of language and 4. A reconstruction of
the language's past. The article challenges some aspects and
rediscusses other topics of the philosophy of the first Heidegger
(Being and Time and The fundamental concepts of Metaphysics).
The two main theses discussed are 1. That there is an original
access to the truth and 2. that the canonical flow of language offers
some irreducible pressure to the prediction of meaning.
Key-words: phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative,
myth

1.
Antropology, Psychology and the Individuation of the
question of Being
 When the scientific field of anthropology, during the periods
of unquestioned prosperity enjoyed in the last century, radicalized
the structuralist fashion by employing it to give primitive social-
collectives a narrative place determined by Eurocentrism, it
became obvious that man's discourse on man, called
“comprehension” (Verstehen) by Dilthey (1833-1911) and (with
proper alterations) by Heidegger (1889-1976), was far from
innocent1. An unity of confirmation is added to the thesis that the
comprehensive event through which man takes possession of
knowledge about himself is coordinated to a lesson of
irrecoverable loneliness, violence and domination. There is no
such a thing as free explanatory knowledge. All scientific
conquests are reflected on its past. They are acquired by the effort
of the present to confront that past and surpass it. The history of
opposition, resistance and meaningful force of canonical texts,
their intentional-property of being revived by other consciousness,
shows that they keep their comprehensiveness through time as
they sacrifice the longing for explanatory unity or extensional
simplicity.
The line that goes from the first hermeneuticists to
Heidegger is characterized by the sum of a gnostic reflection to
hermeneutics. It goes this way: the primacy of interpretation to
access the world is mixed with a reflection about the privilege of
the being that is able to recreate that access. This line of approach
is not an exception to the nineteenth century German intellectual
scene. It was largely available as part of the post-hegelian life of
Germany. Max Stirner (Johann Kaspar – 1806 – 1856) would say:
“As mystical as this may sound, we nevertheless experience it as
a daily experience. (...) When you create the first thought, you
create yourself, the thinker” (2007, p. 170). This apparently
surprising miscegenation rescued an old sense of epistemological
orientation that resorted to the moral and interactive character of
access to the truth. What Heidegger calls the "original question"
bears similarities with this guiding center, but it also develops with

1
The first work in which Dilthey describes the distinction of the human sciences from
the natural sciences is Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883).
rhetorical tools built to avoid the betrayal of these appearances.
We believe that much of the rhetorical strangeness of Heidegger's
texts is an expression of the author's tireless effort to hide his
Gnostic and moral assumptions.
Heidegger's thinking is most evidently linked to this Gnostic
tradition when he engages in different attempts to narrate the
history of Western philosophy as a process of forgetting the
question of Being. He equates both metaphysical dogmatism and
the logical-epistemological approach as part of the historical chain
that bewitched the Being by the empire of the proposition. The
proposition is the model for simplifying reality. In the propositional
expression the question of Being in its aporetic state disappears,
and is replaced by the question of Being in its ontic state, that is,
as a systematization of the various regular or predictable
possibilities of Being. The thought of the German philosopher is a
reflexive invitation to what was lost with this exchange. With that
he gets closer to the Gnostic traditions; and it does more than that:
it reestablishes a rhetoric capable of introducing this tradition in an
intelligent dialogue with the philosophy of the 20th century.
Whoever engages in an intolerant criticism of Heidegger's
terminology and rhetoric must judge his assessment in the light of
these difficulties: how to put the question of Being in dialogue with
the propositional tradition, at a time when the latter is dominant.
His strategy is to put focus into de “questioning” of being. That
being involved in his gnostic self-discovery is the one that lives in
division by his tendency to challenge the paradigmatic flow of
language and law. There is one being among others that can
challenge proposition as he build it. The legacy of Heidegger’s
work keeps falling into human sciences.
According to Heidegger, the Dasein of human beings is
involved in the type of questioning that is able to challenge the
propositional cult of western metaphysics and science. The
formation of a self-indentity is parallel to a further interaction with
Being. Once we start separating ourselves from barbarians and
other “races”, the same principle is developed further. We become
more linked to our origin. The difference between essence and
existence, the ontological difference, generates - through the very
knowledge of this difference – a certain self-understanding of the
role of man in the narrative construction of his own history. This is
something very close to a fact: by anthropologically demarcating
the event of the passage from the pure animal to the rational
animal, we generate a post-mythological knowledge, more
effective than the myths themselves, to promote the inclusion of
human beings in their own history. This knowledge had several
names in our historiography: religion, philosophy, wisdom. In
Western science, the name "metaphysics" gained canonical
status. Generally speaking, it matches the history of our literature.
An event of division caused by the “second fall” - the myth
of Babel - consolidates the despair of humanity as a kind of longing
for the original language. The realm of the lost essence, buried
within the ancient language of Adam or the Greek logos, is placed
on one side, unattainable, and on the other side is set the realm of
existence, the one in which we live through impure speculative
approaches and signs. Human sciences, as taught by this lesson,
are incapable of generating knowledge about human beings
without generating, at the same time, knowledge about this original
division. It seems that the whole function of anthropologies is to
remind us how isolated we are, either from God or from animals.
[We are] out of the divine, out of the natural.
Some would say that the anthropological version of this
knowledge is dangerous, because it generates it as a narrative
dogmatic pride. Heidegger didn’t seem to think so. We do. One
does not generate anything similar to that knowledge of division in
a harmless attitude. When the anthropologist is confident enough
to have an object of study, something he can call “human”, he is
also ready to separate us from animals in a political way. He is
ready to set the conditions that cannot be suppressed without a
calling for war. His awareness of that difference from animals does
not come from a neutral understanding of reality. It comes from
some perspective of superiority or, at least, a perspective of
singularity and some narrative inseparable from political interests.
An anthropologist is something like a royal advisor disguised of
neutral scientists. He defines “human” or “man” accordingly to his
practical need for unification and separation. It is a strategic
differentiation, something maquiavelical in its roots. That’s why, as
the cliché goes, real human unity would not come from scientific
discoveries but from an outwordly extraterrestrial menace. Some
others would say that the psychological expression of the
mentioned knowledge of this comprehensive difference is also
dangerous. It can reify the political condition in a narcissistic
disorder. How can we approach the theme without falling into
those traps? Is it even possible to approach that delicate topic from
a neutral and scientific point of view?
During the beginning of the first part of The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics (1929), Heidegger deals with a reflection
that can be described as an orientation for the identification of the
human being capable of making visible a more decisive aspect of
his symbolic condition than the aspects objectified by psychology.
He introduces a discussion that invokes the need to speak of the
vital principle capable of animating the rhetorical foundation of a
position of challenge, defense or reaction; that is, to animate
precisely the founding position of the difference that marks the
event of comprehension. Heidegger does not go so far as to
denounce tricks, maneuvers, or limitations of psychology. More
diplomatic, he only draws a parallel with psychology before
introducing an interesting concept, which, in our opinion,
completes his general conception of ontological difference and
Dasein with a diversity of new accents: “the affective tones -
euphoria, satisfaction, well- adventure, sadness, melancholy,
anger - they are something psychological anyway” (2006, p. 77).
In the sequence, the author just suggests that the psychological
way of approaching affective tones, despite being much more
available to the popular way of approach, is not decisive for the
analysis of the human-being that he proposes: “we will not reach
the point of affirming, just because this common conception is
maximally close and fits more easily to the old conception of man,
that it is the only possible or even the decisive one ”(2006, p .78).
 But how to detach the theme from psychology? A frequent
psychological theme that matured collaterally with anthropology
was the character of the sectors of the mind that reflected its
receptivity to civilizing archetypes. When we speak of these
archetypes, science emerges as the ultimate model of civilizing
consensus, the group of truths that resist and pass the test of
dialectical recognition. The scientific-social paradigm coincides
with the mental archetype. Self-understanding and science,
therefore, go together: the anthropologist's moral responsibility is
really part of the posture that opens up his “object” of study, which
is not an object in the usual sense, but some narrative reification
of itself. It is the reification of the very patterns of sociability and
human interaction (praxis) recognizable by their methodology. The
hermeneutic circle of comprehension is not a mere curiosity of
reading strategies. It is not the object of some interpretational
empirical search. It is the way in which the reader constructs the
very reality that he reads.
We do not have a blunt opinion about where that
understanding started to emerge. It is true that the Hegelian
attempt to show the phenomenological dynamics of the cultural
accumulation of knowledge was a reaction against the
mechanization of "explanation" - made by the positive sciences -
and in Dilthey a similar inclination can be recognized. Hegel
emphasized negative strategies of culture to develop the concept
of reality as it transforms it. Dilthey created a hermeneutic
methodology to understand that extra-positive or dialectical work
of culture in understanding and building itself. But we do think that
it is in Heidegger writings where these impulses converge. An
exploration of Heideggerian themes should be written, to clarify yet
again - as it has not yet become excessive - this transition.
Of course, there is no consensus about if Heidegger is the
most celebrated philosopher to address this issue. Wittgenstein
was the most famous philosopher in the twentieth century to
question the normative limits of language, to criticize the
philosophical-means of justifying this normative essence – private
language, analysis, etc. – and to leave the enigma on the air: is it
possible to run against limits of the standards of language usage?
One could say he is “The” philosopher to have claim a panoramic
review of “logocentrism”, understood as the normative empire of
the proposition. And as he also gave life to the problem of what is
outside the realm of proposition, that could render the title of the
philosopher that approached the theme of “negativity” in its most
mature format in the twentieth century. We argue, however, that
Heidegger was much more intimate than Wittgenstein with the
aforementioned theme, since the pre-propositional stages that
anticipate the formation of an usage paradigm were explored by
his philosophy with an unprecedented depth. What the
impossibility of escaping from propositional-language teaches
Heidegger – and which was already presupposed in the study of
Western ontology – is that there is an original division event,
mythologically convergent with the narrative of the Babel disaster,
which puts humans in a condition of distance and isolation, each
dependent on its language and unable to leave it without suffering
an anguished strangeness. The only possible authenticity would
be a pre-linguistic one, which leads us to the kind of Gnosticism
we talked already, but which, as one could argue, was present in
the resurrection of rousseaulean rhetoric in ethnology, including a
kind of new respect for a pre-scientific savvy of shamans. This
reflection leads Heidegger to speak, in Being and Time, part two,
of a silent language of consciousness. A non-superfluous phase
of his work borders on this association with the occult. In Steiner's
words (see After Babel, cap. 2), "the occult tradition asserts that a
singular first language, an Ursprache is behind our present
discourse" (1975, p. 58).
But we can explore Heidegger's thinking in another
direction. We will follow a suggestion coordinated with Walter
Benjamin's approach to translation as a culture-reverberating
craft. The black forest thinker wrote his main treatise as a
systematic reflection on the element that must be present together
with the quality of the gnostic element - the being that feels the
lack of the primary language of silence - in order to generate an
opposition to the veiling of reality. With that, the author was able
to approach the question about ordinariness, or the “medianity” of
pragmatic-propositional knowledge, combined with the awareness
of the blocks of opposition and obstacles to its living expression.
This is how Heidegger’s reading of Hegel-Dilthey tradition of
negative-hermeneutics arrives at a theory of truth.
2.
Unveilment and the Element of Truh: aspects and
ruptures of semiotic Inertia

Since Agostini, truth is defined as “the being that unveils

and explains itself” (In: Tomás de Aquino, 1979, p. 23). This is to
say that truth is the element inside of which the being is
consistently separated from falsehood. The premise of such a
definition is that Being can only reveal itself by signs that does not
point to discrepant directions. Signs have to reward intelligent
beings that follow them by distancing them from falsehood. That
system of reward is what one can call the element of truth. It is the
“element” as the competitive context in which truth is chosen over
falsity. So any praxis where the selection of truth over falsity is not
rewarded would fall outside this “element”. “Dasein” is the element
of truth in Heidegger´s theory: the element inside of which truth is
unveiled, or the element in which obscuration of truth is not
prosperous. Dasein is the being that is at stake and therefore can
measure the loss that comes from blockades to the truth.
Contemporary scientific explanation is still rooted in a version of
this view of the element: truth is the element inside of which all
possible changes of signs must have a correlate alteration that
does not tear the historical fabric of its past interpretations. So
western science tradition has an ontic version of the Dasein:
scientific tradition serves as the selective measure for rewarding
truth. Of course, this rules out all counterinductive theories that
would disrespect consolidated acquisition of knowledge from past
signs. Because those would be non-rewarding approaches for
truth. This is a theory of inertia for signs, an entropic devise for
semiotics. The way that nature reveals itself must have some
uniformity, otherwise it is impossible to separate consistently truth
from falsehood.
Heidegger’s account of the problem puts into focus the root
of the “unveil” function. When science is working it presupposes
that the ontological difference that permits it to separate truth from
falsehood consistently is something obvious and even eternal.
They rarely see the negative element of interpretation. Of course,
Heidegger is considering only those privilege ontic-researchers
that can claim the right of “paradigmatic”. Researchers in a
paradigmatic position are in the privileged position of seeing only
the positive side of confirmation: the way evidence transmit
credibility to our knowledge. Since their science is the most
entrenched in the past of culture, they do not need to worry about
facts that would work against the flux of their knowledge. They
organize hypothesis about reality ruling out costly or unsustainable
imagination, but they do not have to think about how the imaginary
of language – the inertia of language flow – would be in another
negative-configuration. What that means is that dominant scientific
fields are in match with the positive canon of imagination of culture.
They are ideologically backed. That’s why they can treat truth as
some probabilistic feature of reality. Because reality cannot
respond outside the limits of language. Therefore, it follows a
tendency of truth. The scientist can’t think the future would
produce a mix of reptiles and mammals because that would break
the history of the signs that unveils being in an uniformed
rewarding way. It would disrespect semiotic inertia. Nature could
not pass mixed signals. This scientific-natural-ontic orientation
matches old theological presupposition that reality cannot unveils
itself in unsustainable ways.
Heidegger goes one step further than theology. He would
agree that ontic-natural approach can have a regular relation with
truth. He would agree that reality only can answer as “nature”, i.e,
some neutral and regular expression of positive reality. But he also
sees that this is not a transcendent fact. This step is a
transcendental contribution from Kant. The fact that the positivity
of nature is the only way for us to reach ontic-knowledge of truth
is only a transcendental fact. It is not some rule of entropy and
inertia given by God. The tendency of truth only exists cause the
past and history of interpretations are persistently extracting its
source from language of the past. There is a relation of language
to language that permits to say of something that it is the “unveil”
of being. Something able to connect the propositions of today with
the logos from the past is needed to keep the originality of truth.
And we cannot simply postulate a natural rule for signs in order to
explain that connection. So, Heidegger summons the fact that
science should not be taken for granted. Ontic interpretations of
the world are not eternal-positive truths guaranteed by a
methodological uniformity and inertia. Science builds a past for its
phenomena every time it must build a semiotic model of constant
response for nature: and that past is built on the basis of language.
That’s the only reason why actual fact-confirmation matches
deontological perspective of reality. Any feature of the actual
existence cannot be stripped of past and, accordingly, of future.
That historical need is the only thing behind scientific discovery of
the formal essence of natural events. The metaphysical
representation of the totality of ens that accompany the complete
determination of possible sense is always changing, and it
changes inside language normative nature. It is impossible to find
an “extraterritorial immunity”2 for signs. They are unveiling Being
at the same time they are reviewing themselves.
So the “truth” element includes an hermeneutic element of
review and re-writing of logos. The element, or Dasein, produces
a torn rupture with the obvious praxis of common sense,
introduces an ontological difference or a counter-inertia, which
allows it to be included in language as a creative hermeneutic
agent. Heidegger produces an unprecedented cut in semantic-
hermeneutical traditions. It brings questions about the nature of
the author and literature creativity to the core of the problem of
meaning. Interpretation and meaning are not merely transcendent-
free data of the world: they are recreated in the very act of

2
“metalanguage of scientific linguistic is compelled to draw on common syntax and
current words. It has no extraterritorial immunity” (Steiner, After Babel, p. 111).
interpretation. This negative element is non-negotiable. That
happens because interpretation is narrative. In addition, the
German thinker rewrites the obsessed relationship of Western
philosophy with the theme of experience and truth. The element
of inauguration and restructuring of knowledge that brings to
human consciousness a relationship with a “meaning”, a plan of
normality and stable value, can be neither a physiological trigger,
nor a social convention, nor an event in the realm of the spirit or
some inertia of sign-things; but it constitutes an element of
understanding the echo of culture that establishes its
comprehensive milestones in aporias and radical issues that are
not resolved. The events that constitute an experience only
materialize as psychological or sociological occurrences after and
when they are inserted in a logical procedural form or rational
problematization. When they are finally logicized they have
acquired some inertia, they are grounded in a canonical past. This
ends up belonging to a return to philosophy as a solution to two
problems: for the crisis of the foundations of the norm and for the
political-historical selection of the cultural echo – the interpretive
continuation of a tradition of anthropomorphism – evaluated as
"correct".
The interpretive review of humanism about itself is the
“original” event - which brings a paradoxical condition to the heart
of thought: the origin is also the review of the origin. The closest
moments to a mysticism in the writings of the author of Being and
Time refer to his tendency to reach an explanation of the logical
theme - that is, the search for truth - in a pre-normative, pre-
linguistic opening space, in a kind of access to the language of
truth that our daily costume would have forgotten. In that pre-
propositional space, however, we only have the plastic dialogue of
language with language. It is the space of review, inflation, non-
truthfunctionality and unpredictability. Strangely, truth is achieved
without being determinate.
3.
 The role of Myth and translation as Echo: the
interaction of language with language and the strive for
hermeneutic reunification

This event of reaching the original truth would be a

reminder of some original dilaceration – the experience of the myth
of Babel. As the most radical dilaceration of all is the division of
tongues, whereby God completes the cycle of the fall initiated by
punishment for Eve's sin, the problem originating in all
communication, interpretation, consensus, etc., is a problem of
“reunification”. But this can only be done in the most radical
hermeneutic field, that is, in the most extreme form of ignition of
otherness that makes a text to follow its course. This field of
negation is not one of objection, neither of speculation, nor even
of commentary, criticism, pastiche, etc.: but it is a field of
translation. Translation is the theorical act that is most likely what
we are searching for. It is not just a reverse engineer of structures
of language; it is a step towards restructuring language. We have
in Heidegger, therefore, a possibility to return to the topic of
translation from a beijaminian perspective of access to a
“language of truth, the disjointed and even silent depository of the
ultimate truth to which every thought aspires” (Benjamin, 1969, p.
77). The fact that Benjamin's work The Task of Translator and the
climax of the author's thought of Being and Time were produced
in such a close window of time should not be a discouragement to
the reading hypothesis that we suggest. For Heidegger as well as
for Benjamin, standing in the place of this knowledge is a risky task
of strangeness, which involves temporality and instability: “A final
solution, before a provisional and temporal one, for this
foreignness, remains out of reach of humanity ” (Benjamin, 1969,
p. 75). The translator appears in the work of the latter as the one
who was romanticized by this “task” of liberating the opening of
truth: “it is the task of the translator to liberate in his own language
that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate
language imprisoned in her recreation of the work ” (Benjamin,
1969, p. 80).
 So, the thing that is beyond the hands of humanity is this: a
semantic or constructed content of the “first language”. Carnap
and his followers would fail in every attempt to surpass that
limitation: “the elementary or tree structures arrived at by the
application of transformational rules to English are not a X-ray”
(Steiner, 1975, p. 111). It is impossible to liberate this first
language inside the text without corrupting the text with more
language. First language is therefore just the gnostic myth behind
that inevitability of language reflection on itself. At that moment, in
order not to create unnecessary dramas, it is necessary to cut the
suspense at its roots and accuse what Benjamin meant. The
imprisoned language to which Benjamin refers is not an intellectual
language of ideograms, but an "echo". It’s a narrative
repercussion. The echo that lingers on the text is its lineage of
possible readings, which is above a semantic or communicative
content. If there is a Gnostic mysticism in Benjamin text, then it is
necessary to separate it from Leibnizian or Pythagorean-
mathematical Gnosticism. The thinker does not advocate the
simplification of language to a residue that is highly communicable
and relivable by the simplest codes; but he advocates the
dissolution of language in an echo flow of its essence; something
much closer to the Hegelian dialectics, which explores the
possibilities generated by alterity-otherness. It is also close to
hermeneutics, which explores the alternances and possibilities
opened by interpretation.
But this peculiarity of the temporal development of texts and
cultural works has some analogies with the way in which natural
things unfold according to a causal rule, or according to an
interpretative law of entropy, the inertia of signs medievalists seem
to believe in as nature was seeing as Gods words. This analogy is
mysterious, but it cannot be overlooked. When a Don Quixote
reader interprets that book in the present, it is clear that the
decisive factor for the “correction” of his interpretations is to build
a past for the text; that is, what one believes to be the “meaning”
of the text is what one believes to be most constant, continuous
and ancient within the text, what determines its echo in a constant
and inevitable way. This is also to build an element for the
interpretation. To build a “model” for the text is just the
mathematical expression for that action: because a model must
simplify the text of Dom Quixote. The result must be an
interpretative-similarity built on inductive basis. So, it would seem
signs can’t violate their own inertia or to go against it’s past. Now,
what is essentially different about building a causal tradition for a
physical phenomenon? Of course, in this case, the physicist's
suggestion of having a correct interpretation of gravity also
involves his inductive hypothesis that the past that he considers
decisive for the production of the phenomenon is the most
constant, reproducible, capable of being shown by simulations and
tests on models. We are facing a thesis released by Kantism: that
the categories that give phenomena their place in the
interconnected physical universe coincide with the temporal
conditions of schematization of humans. But then we have a more
comprehensive explanation for the supposed “inertia” of signs. It
is men who cannot put an object in the chain of his representation
without giving it a human meaning. There is a self-forced inertia of
human to being human. To break the code of meaning is to find its
finite and fallible human crypto-type, the men trace inside of signs.
Explanatory induction is not completely foreign to comprehensive
reflection: it is also based on a hypothesis about the inertia and
history of the phenomenon. In both cases, therefore, there is a
production of the past and a perspective that selects the correct
“echo” - a projection of the future. This is what is called, in good
English, by two expressions: reform and revision.
What the echo of the text produces is the human
reinterpreted by the human. The production of a text, insofar as it
involves the identification of a socio-historical space of recognition
and legitimation, involves the author's commitment to a musical
project, a project to manage its echo: the production of a super-
content. This content is not limited to the semantic content. No
generative-semantic-constructivism can reverse-engineered this
echo. This result coincides, paradoxical as it may be, with the
situation discovered by anthropology regarding the founding
myths of culture: “the myths, thinking among themselves, think
through this imbalance - and what they think is this imbalance
itself, the disparity of being-in-the-world ”(Levi-Strauss, in: 2015,
p. 249). The old theme of modern reflection, therefore, the addition
of knowledge, or experience, is transformed into an analytic of the
construction of the nomos by the “Dasein” that is hosted in that
intrinsically exclusive and excluding nomological element, and that
is situated in the world by the privilege of “reviewing” that world.
Everything indicates that when we speak of the knowledge
generated by our anthropological reflections - whether moral,
metaphysical, religious or mythological - we speak of an
inflationary discourse, which, like translation, adds inflections of
significance derived from its own revisions. There is an “intrinsic
translational condition of anthropology” (Viveiro de Castro, 2015,
p. 233), as Eduardo Viveiro de Castro said. Interestingly, what
standardizes and imposes itself as a paradigm about the natives
described by European methodological structures is not a simple
European metaphysics, but the adaptation that this tradition
makes of itself to serve as a reviewing and interpretive code. The
translator incorporates all the dialectical myths of humanism, of
man as the bridge-crosser, reviewer of history, initiator of culture,
reconciler. But it also demystifies the job of being a human, takes
it out of the realm of transformative action and reduces it to an
anodyne profession. As the human acquires some Dasein, it
becomes not only privileged but also responsible for reproducing
the conditions for the unveiling of truth, or to make it unprofitable
to pursue the untruth.
How to distinguish the translator from a political agent of
culture? In saying, like Nietzsche in The Gay Science (1887), that
translation is colonization, and that our metaphors obey the
impulse of anthropomorphism, we are also admitting that the
metropolitan discourse suffers together in the passage, as it needs
to recode itself to encompass the target culture as a “lower” part
or “Backward” part of its own history. The knowledge of the
ontological difference generated by anthropology, although
legitimate, is not sufficiently superior to the knowledge that
metaphysics and religion endeavors to generate about this
difference: it is responsible for anthropocentrism.
 Needless to say that this approach to the phenomenological
theme of original access to truth escapes the structure of any
empiricist's study, be it classic or based on pure categories. The
shift of focus to “review” places an inevitably linguistic emphasis
on ontological issues. This reflection led Heidegger to a re-reading
of the Hegelian conception of the Dasein, the being that adds to
science its phenomenological figure or original experimental
element. That element of inertia that would seem to stabilize
interpretation always in the path of truth can only exists if there is
a being that is interested in preserving the “echo” that the sign
produces. Conceptualization would equate the extension of this
line of echo inside a tradition of knowledge. The only being
interested in an echo of itself is: cultural beings, or beings that reify
themselves through the reading of their own history. Only culture
mediate itself like that. In its new heideggerian version, Dasein is
the element challenged by the inaugural question of science,
capable of, therefore, representing the moment of aporia that
brings what this science knows to a state of direct and final
historical understanding. It is the element that consistently build a
past for itself with language. In this respect, it is “built by a retro-
projection of the conditioning on the condition” (Levi-Strauss, in:
2015, p. 248). In Heidegger's words in Concepts of Methaphysics,
these are “the concepts that move at the heart of conceptuality and
that always co-insert the conceptor within the question”
(Heidegger, 2006, p. 30). In this interpretative production, the
productive engine is not the construction of a model of the
propositional identity of scientific knowledge, but rather the
recreation of the cultural - and mythological universe – that
conditions our significant phenomenological experiences.
4.
Conclusion: the place of meaning as the place of re-
signifying

There is a privilege to be re-claimed or challenged by the

original mystery that releases meaning. This is only possible if the
interpretation is placed in a listening position capable of subsisting
without resorting to the comfortable familiarity of the available
propositional possibilities. It is necessary to put oneself in a
position of estrangement. One can now ask what is the nature of
this privilege, what kind of cultural pedigree reestablishes a
Dasein? What condition determines the possibility of running
against propositionality and reconstructing the hermeneutic
scenario that brings Being to a place of resignification or historical
echo? How is it possible to create profitable alterity, to go into the
negation, to counter-balance language inertia? Let’s say it bluntly:
in addition to groping in hints about the inevitable coordination
between veiling and unveiling, showing and hiding, Heidegger did
not go much further to answer that old platonic question (first
asked in the Sophist). He, like first Wittgenstein, became
conditioned to the conservative Gnosticism of abstinence, and
also refers to silence as the only focus of authenticity that, being
unable to oppose it, can at least resign itself to these hidden
energies, retaining some of the philosophical pride inside the
peace of conscience that discovers the world and its norms as
inevitable. No matter how far some readers want to go to see less
conservatism in Heidegger, in the end his work will always be a
field of exploitation for reactionary philosophy: the belief that
change is only a romantic naivety and the only place for the
strangeness feeling is “existential” self-isolation. Heidegger´s
version of alterity is conservative. For him, other strategies to find
the non-being would be undignified descents to heteronomical
modes of access, infantile and idle attempts to change history by
creating semantical possible worlds that are nothing but the
ideological reflect of scientific paradigms working inside
imagination. There is something naïve in dialectics, from Plato to
Hegel. It’s attempt to draw difference from nothingness can only
re-logicize the world as some extensional semantical set of
possible references. Here Heidegger concludes, again, in the
same mode as first Wittgenstein: science is blinded to absolute
truth. And one could even say that the similarities are extraordinary
if, after decades of reading, we had no longer agreed that this
silence approach for the non-being was older than Tales of Miletus
and could be found in the remote origins of Oriental thought.
That said, we should not conclude one could not use
reflection about Dasein to go further than Heidegger. The ability to
feel challenged does not seem to be an abstract psychological
property that we could reproduce through the right manipulations
of brain physiology. But it does not need to be a feeling of
existential anguish as well. If we want to go against language with
dignity, it is not true that the only alternative is to confine ourselves
to a monastery and remain silent. Literature is one proof of the kind
of agency one can draw upon in order to create meaning. There is
space for logos to fight logos. If with the aporias of translation we
have evidence that the study of language (be it semantic or socio-
linguistic) hardly manages to abstract itself from the philosophical
reflections that accompany it, it is because language is more than
an object of positive study, either of semantics, whether of history,
sociology or formal-hermeneutics; it is a source of aporetic
inspiration that found a constant pressure to its own change. The
old dialectical claims against mechaniscism and materialism can
reborn inside the very consciousness of the ontological difference.
Now we need to distinguish this class of reflection from what
is commonly known as the linguistic turn of philosophy. The
linguistic turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century passes
mixed signals, as it brought together both thinkers with a
mathematical inclination and those with a Gnostic inclination.
Heidegger's inclination for language in its most mature phases
corresponds to a maturation of Husserl’s previous inclinations
about the original place of Being: consciousness. Language is the
only past of language. Since language is the most elementary
instrument for creating narratives of unity, metaphysics begins with
it, in two stages of corruption: when it becomes the instrument of
Eve's negotiation with the serpent; and when it separates people
in Babel, giving an impulse to otherness and producing a reflective
cultural echo. In all cases, the generation of blindness that begins
with it is the beginning of the first anthropological-normative
illusion: anthropomorphism, which, as Nietzsche said in Truth and
Lie in the extra-moral sense, invests human image through all
analog networks and metaphorical words that foresaw the
synchronous structuring of linguistic correlation chains. All that
means that study of language brought us to a pos-metaphysics
reflection about changes of Culture, and not to an algorithmic anti-
metaphysical structural technicism commonly known as the
analytical “linguistic-turn”.

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