File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0304, message 71


Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 14:46:59 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Re: Truth as propaganda


>In a message dated 4/2/03 3:44:20 PM, riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au writes:
>
>>Is this true? What are our US list members hearing? Chomsky ties this
>>in with a propaganda campaign for the mid-term elections and for the
>>Bush doctrine of 'preventive force' - the precedent for our new world
>>order (the 'pax Americana') currently being enacted in Iraq.
>>
>Back in my undergrad days, in the sixties, I was profoundly impressed with
>the thought of Jacques Ellul-- Technological Society, Propaganda, and his
>Barthian theology. I ended up writing my senior thesis on Nietzsche--nothing
>extraordinary, the typical three or four supplemented book reports stapled
>together, but I focused in on an Ellulian analysis of technological society
>as the nihilism Nietz the peach was thinking about. I didn't really begin to
>'understand' Heidegger until grad school, but I then realized that my senior
>thesis had circled around the later-discovered Heideggerian interpretation of
>Nietzsche's concept of nihilism, the "will to will" and the question
>concerning technology-- and that theme became my master's thesis.
>
>Has anyone on this list aligned the thinking of Heidegger with that of Ellul,
>or know of texts comprehending this alignment?

Hen,

I also read Ellul as a graduate student and then incorporated him 
into some of my courses early on.
His sense of the vulnerability of the isolated individual lost in the 
mass of mass communication strikes me as analogous, in certain ways, 
to some of Heidegger's theorizing about falling into the they.  One 
of his (Ellul's) most striking sayings goes something like " The 
power of propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins."  I think he 
had a rather romantic notion of the community-creating power of 
dialogue as empowering the individual to stand up to the pull of 
propaganda, and thereby avoid absorption into the mass.  But I'm not 
sure that his idea of dialogue here envisions a thinking dialog. 
Rather, more of relational holding environment.  Perhaps more  Buber 
than Gadamer here, but quite a distance from Heidegger's 
hermeneutical phenomenology of speech grounded in Aristotle.

regards,

Allen





-- 
  Allen Scult					Dept. of Philosophy
HOMEPAGE: " Heidegger on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics":	Drake University
http://www.multimedia2.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html	Des Moines, Iowa 50311
PHONE: 515 271 2869
FAX: 515 271 3826


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