The article aims to show that semantic and pragmatic conceptions of meaning, assumed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, respectively, lead to dissimilar interpretations of the difference the political and politics, wide-spread in contemporary thought. The thesis is that Heidegger and the called heideggerians left, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, assuming the prevalence of Western ontological epochal beginning, are committed to a semantic conception, ultimately essentialist. The Western history is guided by a metaphysics identified with technology, so that, first, modern subjective freedom and the rights that leads is overlapped by that, and secondly, that politics and the political remain split and the former is powerless to alter the latter. For pragmatics, supported among others by Merleau-Ponty, the meaning is not given by a previous opening world but is established by immanent meaning practices, which have the power to open world. Philosophy, in this view, has the task of replacing the latent sense of practices by a manifest sense. In that vein, Claude Lefort holds a non-essentialist conception of the political, emphasizing the novelty of modern democracy and the importance of human rights.
Keywords:
semantic, pragmatic, political difference, world opening, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Merleau-Ponty, Lefort
García, J. F. (2017). Practices as world’s opening: semantics, pragmatics, and political difference. Revista De Filosofía, 72, pp. 55–71. Retrieved from https://revfono.uchile.cl/index.php/RDF/article/view/47597
