3 On Occupying Terms and Definitions like Train Stations
Some years ago Ex-Minister Heiner Geißler(1), on the occasion of a political confrontation with the Greens or SDP, remarked: one must occupy terms and definitions like train stations.
Independent of the militaristic undertones, his appeal expresses an entirely correct and important maxim of thought: terms, newly arising or coined, found (according to Plato, the ideas themselves are eternal) or discovered, are defined on their semantic (content-)level to a great extent by their “originators”. Let’s call them that for now.
Originators are the discoverers of terms. On the emergence, birth, or finding of terms, we have a number of important and interesting theories in the history of mind. The Jewish original society went so far as to find the origin of all things in the Word (The Old Testament): light, world, humankind, evolution. For this reason adherents of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions are distinguished from all others as “people of the Book.”
Plato takes up this mental orientation when he reveals ideas, linguistic archetypes, the three general terms such as “truth,” “beauty,” “justice,” etc. to be the most important ideas, subordinated only to the “idea of the Good” is subordinated (i.e., “God”). Each person strives after the good for him or herself, for which they require truth, beauty, and justice. Then there are yet further derivations of these ideas, with which, however, the problems inherent to the concept of ideas begins (which I can’t explicate further here).
These core ideas, in any case, transcend time and are only accessible via the mind, or rather thought, and not via the senses. They are thus bound to language. They may be discerned through the senses as image in the arts, which in turn should represent the world: the world of ideas in the world (= ideals). Plato does not say, to fall in love with someone. He says, “and thus arises in them the image of love” (as discovered by Plutarch).
With Plato, ideas (= general terms) develop dialectically. That is, in them emerges their opposites as well: their antitheses, the antipodes.
Hegel seizes on this idea and sets thesis and antithesis battle with and against one another, until they arrive at a synthesis that unites the two adversaries on a higher level that leads both forward.
The French philosopher Lyotard on one hand, and the international postmodern philosophy on the other, content themselves with the conflict between terms. They permit the antipodes to coexist, side by side on equal footing: to learn to tolerate contradictions and resist the convulsive impulse to seek out synthesis, consensus, etc. (so is the motto). The world is colorful and varied and controversial.
A good example for the development and spread of a term, and how this can control and manipulate our thinking, is the term “homophobe”. It’s new; only in the last few years has it entered general use.2 It suggests, in thought as well as in the unselfconscious general public, a sort of mental distorder, namely the fear (phobia) of homosexuality. If I am opposed to homosexuals, then I’m neurotic, sick.
“Phobia” is a term out of Sigmund Freud’s vocabulary, and is one of the most typical and widely-used neuroses of all. Fears can be more or less quickly and effectively remedied through therapy (and not necessarily via psychoanalysis at two sittings a week for €150 a piece for two years [see, on this subject, Blog No. 167, “On Liberation”]).
To discover a neural disorder in our contemporaries, because they – raised in our Christian-dominated culture – confront homosexuality with a certain dread, caution, or even fear– that is a rather clever move by the homosexual fraction. It is precisely in the realm of sexuality that nature, and thereafter culture, needed to evolve dread, caution, and fear– why that might be is another philosophical question. It is a question, to what degree desire should (or should not) determine our lives and thoughts.
The present development of proscriptions against homophobia seem, however, no longer reversible. No, anxious-neurotic is something we do not wish to be: thus, we accept the otherness of the Others.
In Freud’s theory all people, though especially pronounced among neurotics, also homosexual. That is, not exclusively, but also. We are actually everything; one need only consider our dreams, or the illustrious fantasies on offer from the pornography industry. Something within us hinders us, holds us back nevertheless, from taking part in all of it, from living everything, whatever this “It” (after Freud) wants. This “something” Freud defines precisely as the “super-ego.” More on that later.
The occupation, conquest, and enforcement of the term “homophobe” to come back to the beginning of my remarks on the finding or discovery of terms, is one of the great successes of the homosexual liberation movement, probably a larger one than all the laws that might be passed in all the world. And whoever lets this term cross his or her lips is immediately outed as a friend of homosexuals.
My attitude towards inversion, to come back to Freud, has nonetheless remained the same. A hard and exclusionary dogmatism, heterosexuality, is replaced by another hard and exclusionary dogmatism, which excludes the opposed Other in turn. Perhaps also a form of fundamentalism, that would see itself as a liberating, or good, or natural sexuality supersedes another fundamentalism.
Why should one, as a man, reject the feminine in the sexual domain? Why should I, as a man, acquaint myself with the masculine in the sexual domain? What do I gain from this? What would it bring a woman, if she were to acquaint herself with the feminine?
(This train of thought plays, somewhat ironically overly broadly, a certain role in my new book, “On Love and Lust.” It influenced me in this blog almost continuously. Read more there!)
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1Geißler was particularly active in the 70s and 80s as a critical voice of leftist politics in Germany. He was often controversial for his dismissive (and occasionally suspicious) stance towards left-leaning politicians, and particularly for implicitly accusing many as terrorist sympathizers during the attacks of the Red Army Fraction. Paradoxically, his recent work has tended left, and he has been actively engaged as a neutral moderator in political conflicts, notably over the controversial “S21” expansion of the Stuttgart Central Station. -Ed.
2The term “homophobe” was coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s, and entered use in the German-speaking psychology literature in the early 1970s. In the more common usage, however, it first appeared in the 1990s; and most speakers are likely unaware of its original meaning, connoting a neurotic fear in the manner of other clinical phobias. -Ed.
translated by Andrew Walsh
