In the accelerating urgency to find a way out, or through our world-shaking crisis, many efforts as we know are bent towards the material or technological end of the spectrum of possibilities—from Elon Musk’s attempt to literally escape the earth and begin anew on Mars, to ever more sophisticated medical or environmental methods for combating what could be terminal physical breakdown in our bodies and/or the natural world. At the more spiritual end of the spectrum, many are now turning to the phenomenon of language in order to find a path through our alienating, linguistic entrapment in the now obsolete logic of the metaphysical world or two-world paradigm of spirit/matter. Two great Continental philosophers, Nietzsche and then Heidegger strived to bring to language the world-shaking moment that we call the end of metaphysics (the death of god), the end of the Platonic two-word paradigm of spirit vs matter. Whereas Nietzsche sought to articulate an inversion of the historical privileging of spirit over matter, Heidegger claimed that this move still remained metaphysical in its structure, thus trapping us once again in the now logically obsolete two-world paradigm. Heidegger rejected any simple inversion of values (e.g. privileging biology over spirit), claiming that overturning Platonism must become a twisting free of it….
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