Concept Definitions

1st Section: What is Philosophy?

• Truth & Illusion:

  • In the context of 20th-century philosophy, the concept of truth becomes “complex,” “problematic,” “multidimensional,” “relational,” and “equivocal”.
  • For Marx, truth is connected to the deconstruction of ideological thinking through political practice, aiming to change material conditions.
  • Nietzsche posits that every truth and knowledge is perspectival, meaning it is relative to a certain point of view, and the world includes infinite interpretations. He also suggests that philosophy and science, born out of the Apollonian drive, are nothing more than rhetoric self-defenses against a deeper truth revealed in art. He argues that consciousness is structurally related to and driven by self-betrayal, lie, disguise, and dissimulation, making moral values and ideals instruments of domination rather than independent truths. Language itself is considered illusory as it misses singularity and homogenizes reality.
  • Freud suggests that “self-knowledge” is a source of illusion and misunderstanding because consciousness cannot fully account for its own productions. Truth, for Freud, can only be obtained through a systematic deconstruction of conscious thinking and ideas, as the unconscious constantly disguises, dissimulates, and conceals itself.
  • Heidegger equates Being with Truth, defining truth as “disclosedness,” “openness,” and “clearing” – that which opens up metaphysical conceptions of Being and makes them possible.

• Ideology:

  • According to Marx and Engels, ideology is “false consciousness” – not merely an error, but a deep-seated tendency to ignore the truth, representing a systematic and necessary distortion of it that conceals the exploitation inherent in socio-economic relations between classes.
  • It emerges with the “division of labour,” specifically between material and mental labour, which leads to material inequalities and private property. Ideology is an alienated consciousness, a belief in consciousness’s autonomy and freedom from the social and material conditions of production. It is the belief that ideas are the ruling factor of the world and human history, and that transforming the world is a matter of changing dominant forms of consciousness.
  • The ruling class is caught in a misunderstanding: it ignores that all ideas have a material origin and that its own ideas express its class interests.
  • Althusser radically reinterprets ideology as a profoundly unconscious phenomenon based on social structure, rather than something related to consciousness. It is a “system of representations” that imposes itself on individuals primarily as structures, not through their consciousness, acting functionally on them via a process that escapes them. Ideology is the sum of forms in which individuals are entangled in relations of production, institutions, and class struggle, representing the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”.

• Unconscious:

  • For Freud, the unconscious is the dominant part of the psyche and the key to understanding consciousness itself. It is not a diminished version of consciousness but performs all psychic processes, including full-blown linguistic statements and affective life, acting as an independent psychological agent. It provides the “truth” about our conscious self, suggesting a structurally “divided subject/self”. Access to the unconscious is gained through phenomena like dreams and hypnosis.
  • Lacan offers a “structuralist” return to Freud, asserting that the unconscious is structured as a language. It “thinks” and performs linguistic operations. Lacan posits that we are alienated not only through images (imaginary) but also in language (symbolic), implying that our fears and desires originate from “another in ourselves”.

• Will to Power:

  • In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the Will to Power is a metaphysical principle stating that everything is a variation of this will, which produces all values and moral ideas to disguise itself. He sees the world as fundamentally “will to power” and nothing else.
  • It represents the affirmation of being’s multiplicity and the affirmation of the multiplicity of truth. Actions are judged according to their capacity to express the Will to Power.

• Dreams:

  • Nietzsche discusses dreams as “art-worlds” that are more consistent and enjoyable than reality itself, revealing the very building principle of reality. He distinguishes them from reality, suggesting they are “unreal or superreal”.
  • Freud considers the interpretation of dreams (Traumdeutung) as the “via regia” (royal road) to a knowledge of the unconscious. He describes the manifest dream-content as a transcript of the latent dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, highlighting that linguistic thinking can occur without self-conscious awareness.

• Anxiety & Nothingness:

  • These concepts are generally associated with continental philosophy’s interest in “limit phenomena” of human existence. The source refers to Rudolf Carnap’s critique of “metaphysical statements” by thinkers like Heidegger, such as “Das Nichts nichtet” (The nothing nihilates), which Carnap deemed unverifiable “pseudo-statements,” asserting that “Nothing” is a logical operator, not a subject-term. While mentioned in this critical context, a direct definition of “anxiety” or “nothingness” as core philosophical concepts is not provided in the given sources.

• Being & Beings:

  • For Heidegger, his philosophy is the “Question of Being”. He distinguishes between “Being” (Sein/Seyn) and “beings” (Seiendes). He criticizes metaphysics for conflating Being with “beingness” (essence) and for thinking only “beings” rather than “Being itself”.
  • Being, for Heidegger, is understood as “disclosedness,” “openness,” and “clearing” – that which enables metaphysical conceptions of Being.

• Metaphysics:

  • The label “continental” philosophy was invented in part to distinguish other currents from a logical interpretation of language, including movements that engaged with traditional metaphysical concerns. The Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle), particularly Rudolf Carnap, sought the “overcoming of metaphysics through logical analysis of language,” viewing metaphysical statements as obscure and unverifiable “pseudo-statements”.
  • Heidegger’s philosophy is characterized as a “destruction of metaphysics,” aiming to uncover primordial experiences of Being that have guided our understanding. He argues that metaphysics has historically focused on “beings” and their “beingness” (essence) but has failed to think “Being as such” or the difference between Being and beings, leading to the “forgetfulness of Being”.

• History:

  • In the context of 20th-century philosophy, World War I and II revealed the destructive potential of industrialization and globalization, marking “contemporary” thought by catastrophe. However, philosophy is not merely a passive echo of historical events but has its own temporality, with philosophical ideas sometimes anticipating socio-political transformations.
  • For Hegel, history is a “fully rational process” and the “self-realization of reason,” where “What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable”. Philosophy’s function, in this view, is entirely theoretical: to observe, describe, and understand this process.
  • Heidegger contrasts with Hegel, viewing history as a process of decay, where “any ‘springing-from’ is degeneration” in the field of ontology.

• Historical Materialism:

  • This is Marx and Engels’ theory, which is presented as a “true” theory because it leads to political practice and revolutionary action. It argues that the only thinking that is not ideological is that of revolutionary practice, which re-establishes the link between theory and practice that ideology denies. It implies that truth is the concrete deconstruction of ideological thinking through practically changing the material conditions of a concrete society.

• Art & Artistic Creation:

  • Nietzsche heavily engages with art, viewing it as a means to renew philosophy. He suggests that philosophy must adopt the perspective of the artistic creator, embracing irrational, illogical, affective, and vital expression. The “genius artist” is an ideal who creates their own codes and rules, embodying the “master’s morality”.
  • Freud also considers art as a field of psychoanalytic investigation.
  • Merleau-Ponty connects language to art, suggesting that words are ways of “singing” the world and express its “emotional essence,” making reading a novel more than just intellectual pleasure.

• Culture:

  • Freud extended psychoanalysis to all spheres of culture, examining the “psychopathology of everyday life” and the constant over-determination of conscious thoughts and actions by unconscious desires.
  • Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology explains societies and their manifestations as a “whole” with internal coherence, studying the diversity of human cultures. He argues that human “nature” is a “universal combinatorial matrix” that produces cultural diversity, making particular cultures surface productions of this deeper universal structure. He emphasizes that cultural diversity is fundamental for identity, as a culture gains identity only in its differential relationship to other cultures.

2nd Section: What is Modernity?

• Rationality and Scientific Progress:

  • Philosophical modernity is characterized by an increasing rationalization of all forms of life and the restriction of theological power. Philosophers and epistemologists often praise the scientific revolutions in mathematics and natural sciences as key aspects of modernity.
  • Horkheimer and Adorno critique modern reason, arguing it is inherently instrumental and calculating, leading to new forms of repression and injustice, and tending towards domination rather than understanding of nature. This instrumental reason becomes reified and empty of critical dimension, akin to a machine.

• Myth:

  • Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Enlightenment, despite its aim to “dispel myths,” paradoxically entangles itself more deeply in mythology, returning into myths. They suggest that myth itself is a first step towards enlightenment, being a form of rational explication with explanatory power. Their “Critical Theory” aims to “demythologize the Myth of Enlightenment,” revealing how instrumental reason and exploitation appear as an inevitable historical necessity, akin to a myth.

• Dialectics of Enlightenment:

  • This concept, from Horkheimer and Adorno’s work, refers to the ambivalence of European Enlightenment’s heritage. While Enlightenment promised freedom and equality, its reality led to new forms of “barbarism,” repression, and injustice, demonstrating an “intimate link between myth and reason”. The “dialectic” implies that reason, as a historical force aiming for emancipation, contains within itself the potential for its opposite: domination and irrationality.

• Disciplinary Power & Biopower:

  • Foucault’s “genealogy of modern society” reveals hidden forms of domination underneath modern narratives of emancipation.
  • Discipline (since the late 17th century) is a “type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”. It focuses on controlling and operating on the body to produce efficient workers and reasonable citizens, reducing political force while maximizing useful force.
  • Biopolitics or Biopower (implied in the conclusion of Foucault’s section) refers to power as a control and preservation of life, combining with discipline to form modern power.

• Post-modernity & Meta-narratives:

  • Lyotard defines postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives”. It is the condition of knowledge in highly developed societies, also termed “postindustrial society,” characterized by the centrality of language, computers, information, and rapid technological change.
  • Meta-narratives (or grand narratives) are totalizing, systematizing, overarching, and all-encompassing forms of reason or stories, such as Neoliberalism or Marxism, that attempt to explain and legitimize social reality. Postmodernity sees the dispersion and fragmentation of these grand narratives, leading to epistemic and political instability where truth becomes relative, flexible, and plural, emerging from multiple points of view and perspectives.

3rd Section: What is Language?

• Words/names, Signification/meaning, Things/reference:

  • In 20th-century philosophy, language becomes a central topic of investigation.
  • Husserl’s intentional theory of language posits that the essence of language is its intentional reference to objects. A sign combines a physical side (sound, written form) and a psychic side (acts of naming, meaning an object). Meaning (Bedeutung) is an act of linguistic reference to an object or state of affairs, and also what is apprehended by this act. He distinguishes between “empty meaning-intention” (meaning something in its absence) and “fulfilling meaning-intention” (intuiting something as it is meant).
  • Merleau-Ponty argues that linguistic meaning is not merely an internal mental occurrence; rather, language originates in “implicit and vague” corporeality, with its ground being affective and “anonymous”. He states that “Thought is no ‘internal’ thing, and does not exist independently of the world and of words”. Words are like objects or tools, prolongations of the body, and “The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world”. He also notes that words have an “affective value,” an “existential” dimension, and an “emotional essence”.
  • Saussure distinguishes between “language” (langue – the system) and “speech” (parole – individual acts of speaking), and his binary structure of the sign (signifier/signified) implies that linguistic entities derive meaning through their relationship to other entities (differences precede identities).

• Essences & Concepts:

  • Nietzsche critiques the formation of concepts, stating that “Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary forgetting the distinctions”. He suggests that language, through its reliance on concepts like “substance” and “properties,” homogenizes reality and makes us believe it is uniform.
  • Heidegger aims to uncover the “lost meaning” of philosophical concepts by returning to their Greek origin, believing that in their origin, concepts are “pure” and free from misinterpretation.
  • Husserl’s phenomenology aims to understand the processes of consciousness that “constitute” the “sense” (Sinn) of our world, making it meaningful. His intentionality posits that consciousness is directed to the “things themselves” without mediation of ideas or representations.

• Intentionality, Meaning Intention, Meaning Fulfilment:

  • Central to Husserl’s phenomenology, intentionality is the “essential property of consciousness to be immediately directed to an object”. It means that consciousness is always consciousness of something.
  • Meaning intention (or “empty meaning-intention”) refers to the act of meaning something in its absence.
  • Meaning fulfilment refers to the act of intuiting something as it is meant, confirming or illustrating the meaning. Husserl explains that the “sense-informed expression” becomes one with the act of meaning-fulfilment when the “meant” thing is present.

• Language, Metaphors & Ontology (Nietzsche):

  • For Nietzsche, language is considered illusory because it homogenizes reality and misses singularity, making us believe reality is uniform. It conveys a thinking of substance and properties, implying a “doer” behind the deed, which Nietzsche rejects as an invention. His critique implies that traditional ontology, focused on fixed “being” rather than “becoming,” is influenced by the deceptive nature of language. While “metaphors” are listed as a key notion, the provided text directly focuses on language’s homogenizing and illusory nature rather than a detailed theory of metaphor in Nietzsche.

• Language as a system or a structure:

  • Saussure distinguishes “language” (langue) as the system of phonetic and semantic patterns from “speech” (parole), the individual act. He describes linguistic entities as meaningful only through their relationship to other entities, emphasizing that “differences precede identities” and that “value” makes meaning.
  • Lacan applies a “structuralist” approach, asserting that the unconscious is “structured as a language”. He radicalizes Saussure by suggesting that signs have no consistency and that the unconscious operates through metaphor and metonymy, “emptying language from signification”. Language, for Lacan, reveals the structure of our social and “symbolic” reality and is simultaneously a guarantee for and an undermining force of social order.

• Language-games:

  • Lyotard draws inspiration from Wittgenstein’s “speech act theory” to explain that “to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics”. Society is understood as a “heterogenous context of incompatible players and games,” an “open multiplicity of adversaries,” rather than a unitary whole. The concept emphasizes that language is not monolithic, but an open multiplicity of “language games,” each with its own rules and modes of operation.

4th Section: What is Alterity?

• Humanism, Particularism & Universalism:

  • Levi-Strauss critically examines “occidental humanism,” which claims the universality of human nature, intellect, knowledge, truth, and morality. This humanism, despite its ethical motivation to reduce inequalities, can reduce alterity to an illusion, assuming a deeper similarity.
  • He distinguishes between Greek and Roman culture, which recognized only their own culture and rejected others as “nature” (particularism), and Western universalism (e.g., big religions/ideologies), which defends the identity of “mankind” but disregards cultural differences. Universalism often explains factual diversity through an evolutionary explanation, treating different cultures as stages in a single line of development, thereby “wiping out the diversity of cultures while pretending to accord it full recognition”.
  • Todorov also discusses Christian egalitarianism (as universalism), which, while promoting love for the other, often leads to the misrecognition of the other’s alterity, subjectifying and assimilating the other to one’s own cultural identity.

• Universal Structural Matrix:

  • For Levi-Strauss, human “nature” is understood not as immutable structures, but as a universal combinatorial matrix (or code/structure) that produces cultural diversity. This “structure” is the a priori of culture, allowing him to conceive social reality as one actualization of all possibilities that the structure offers, where empirical culture is a variation of this deep structure.

• Prohibition of Incest:

  • While listed as a key notion for this section, the provided sources do not offer a direct definition or explanation of the “prohibition of incest” within Levi-Strauss’s theory. His work on kinship systems often centers on this as a foundational rule for the transition from nature to culture, but this specific detail is not elaborated in the given text.

• Nature & Culture:

  • Levi-Strauss distinguishes between nature and culture, exploring how societies organize themselves in relation to both. He argues that human “nature” provides a universal “code” or “matrix” from which a multiplicity of divergent empirical cultures are produced. He shows how cultural structures (like totemic laws) organize social differences by projecting them onto the realm of nature.
  • In the context of feminism, the sex/gender distinction also relates to nature/culture, where sex refers to biological factors (nature) and gender to social identity (culture).

• Me as an Other / Imaginary & Symbolic Other:

  • Inspired by Rimbaud’s “Car je est un autre” (Because I is another), Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory posits that we are strangers to ourselves due to internalized alterity (the unconscious).
  • He introduces the distinction between the imaginary other (petit a) and the symbolic Other (grand A).
    • The imaginary other is the ego or “I,” with which we mistakenly identify ourselves, often through an exterior image (e.g., the mirror stage). This leads to an alienation of desire through imaginary identification.
    • The symbolic Other is the system of language itself, the collection of all words and expressions in a given language. It structures us internally, as our personal and social life depends on language, and desire exists only in language. This leads to an alienation of desire through verbalization.

5th Section: What is Capitalism?

• Commodity & Commodity Fetishism:

  • In Marx’s Das Kapital, a commodity is initially a trivial thing but becomes “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties” once it assumes the form of a commodity.
  • Commodity Fetishism describes how people in capitalist societies consider their goods and commodities in a mystified way. The “transcendent” character of the commodity means its value cannot be grasped intrinsically but only in relation to another commodity, embodying value. It conceals the social relations of production and the abstract labor that creates value, making social relations between producers appear as social relations between products. This represents a situation where capitalist society is “entangled in metaphysical ideas that dominate our everyday life”.

• Capitalism as an economical structure (base & superstructure):

  • yDrawing on Marx and Engels, Althusser understands society as a structure consisting of three fundamental levels: the economic base (productive forces and relations of production) and the superstructure (legal and political institutions, and ideology). Capitalism is defined by the private ownership of means of production and a market model driven by capital accumulation and profit.

• Ideology (Althusser’s perspective):

  • As detailed above, Althusser views ideology as an unconscious phenomenon rooted in social structure, a system of representations that shapes individuals’ imaginary relationships to their real conditions of existence, ensuring the reproduction of relations of production. This differs from Marx’s “false consciousness” in its emphasis on unconscious, material practices.

• Production of Subjects:

  • For Althusser, ideology functions to “recruit” or “transform” individuals into subjects through an operation called interpellation or hailing. The concept of the “subject” (as an independent origin of thoughts, actions, and emotions) is an ideological category that leads individuals to believe they are autonomous, when in fact their practices are determined by social relations and, ultimately, the economy. Ideology addresses individuals as “I” or “subject” from birth, causing them to believe in their subjective identity.

• Schizophrenia & Capitalism:

  • Deleuze and Guattari (in Anti-Oedipus) draw a comparison between schizophrenia (understood not as a disease, but as a “schizophrenic process” or “universal producer” of desire) and capitalism.
  • Both are characterized by a tendency towards decoding social codes. Capitalism stimulates over-production through a radical decoding process, freeing global streams of capital and instituting a “free floating social configuration”.
  • However, while capitalism tends towards the schizophrenic process, it is also its “unreachable limit” or “apocalyptic horizon”. Capitalism is contradictory; it stimulates decoding but constantly reinvents new codes and forms of repression (“re-coding”) to maintain control. A pure schizophrenic process would destroy capitalism.

• Desire & Desire Machines:

  • For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is redefined as a transindividual (collective) activity of social and material production, not a psychological or mental process, nor originating in a lack.
  • They argue that “Desire produces, its product is real,” and “Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it”. This concept of “desiring-machines” emphasizes desire’s productive capacity in the real world, challenging psychoanalysis’s view of desire as restricted to inner mental representation.

6th Section: What is Feminism?

• Representational politics:

  • While not explicitly defined, the concept is implied in feminism’s critique that “social and political theory was (and still is) written by men, for men and about men,” rendering women invisible or marginal. This suggests that how women are represented (or not represented) in theory and discourse has political consequences for their social standing and power. The aim is to challenge these existing representations and establish new ones.

• Sex & Gender:

  • Feminism questions the relationship between sex and power.
  • Sex refers to biological and organic factors such as genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, and physical aspects (often seen as “nature”).
  • Gender refers to social identity and the social process of dividing people and practices along the lines of sexed identities (often seen as “culture”). This division often involves hierarchies, privileging or devaluing certain categories.

• Gender Identity & Problem of Identity Groups:

  • Gender identity refers to the social construction of being male, female, or other gendered identities. The text notes that feminism (especially third-wave) emphasizes intersectionality, recognizing how gender interacts with race, class, sexuality, and ability, leading to a critique of “universal womanhood” and an embrace of “gender as Fluid/Performance”. This points to the complexity and diversity within “identity groups” beyond a singular, universal female experience.

• Oedipean Complex & Pre-Oedipal:

  • The Oedipal story in Freudian psychoanalysis is described as the construction of the self, based around a male’s response to his mother and to becoming a man, with the libido identified as male and a biologistic bias. The “complex of castration” is presented as a male construction of the emergence of sex duality.
  • Feminists critique this male-centered (phallocentric) narrative, with some focusing on the role of the Mother in the development of the self, in contrast to Freud’s emphasis on the Father. The “pre-Oedipal” stage (implied by the discussion of “young children” being “amorphously sexual/sensual” before developing distinct selves or desires) refers to the phase before the Oedipus complex shapes gender identity.
  • Deleuze and Guattari explicitly criticize Freud’s Oedipus complex, arguing it restricts desire to the inner sphere of the subject, turning the unconscious from a “factory” of desire into a “classical theatre”.

• Becoming a girl & Becoming a boy:

  • This relates to the construction of gender identity. The text highlights Freud’s view that sexual identities are deeply internalized, and “to become a self = become man or woman”.
  • Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” signifies that female identity is purely cultural, produced by civilization as a whole, rather than being determined by biological, psychological, or economic fate. This implies that “becoming a boy” is also a cultural construction.

• Situation, Immanence & Transcendence:

  • These concepts are key to Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy, drawing from Sartrean existentialism.
  • Existence is defined as the capacity to project oneself beyond one’s concrete situation (the factual reality one is “thrown” into), realizing one’s possibilities.
  • Transcendence refers to this movement of self-projection, creation, and freedom from a given situation.
  • Immanence (though not directly defined, it is implied as the opposite of transcendence) refers to being confined within one’s given situation or circumstances. De Beauvoir argues that women have been historically relegated to immanence, experiencing their bodies as alien objects to which they are bound, hindering their capacity for transcendence and freedom.