Hello
I'm studying Nietzsche and Heidegger amongst other philosophers for A level philosophy (lol) and need some points cleared up. It's a Sunday and school is closed so I cannot hunt down my lecturers but my mind is BRISTLING for knowledge
- If Nietzsche goes on to deny nihilism/teach us to overcome it, why does he base his philosophy on nihilism in the first place? Is it coming from the notion that Christianity is life-denying and that therefore it is the only conclusion that nihilism is the case a priori? Or am I missing something?
- My lecturer told us that Heidegger says that humans are merely language machines, and that "language is spoken through us" - that language is not a man-made thing and has always been there, and we are simply machines with the purpose of formulating grammatically correct sentences, and we do not convey any meaning when speaking a sentence. I had difficulty understanding this at first but I tried coming up with a sort of allegory to perhaps help me understand this:
Taking the example of a drummer playing the drums. Each tom, snare, cymbal, etc, is already there on his drumkit. Furthermore, the sound each piece makes is already defined by the physical properties of each piece on the kit. The sound is already there, it is not man-made per se. The drummer therefore is not making the sound. The drummer is simply a means through which the sound is conveyed. The drummer simply acts as a machine that formulates these pre-defined sounds such that they end up sounding good.
Does this example/allegory make sense or am I off by a longshot? If so, I could really do with some clarification on what Heidegger meant by all this.
Thank you in advance to whoever can help me out :)
(paging InternetIntellectual)