The Village
“It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity, and boredom with itself.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Welcome to the Village
Attendees of this three-day seminar, entitled Welcome to the Village, will explore an intersection of thinking between Martin Heidegger, Marshall McLuhan, and Patrick McGoohan. The discussion will be lead by Magnus Eckhart.
The event will begin with an overview of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, with an emphasis on the influence of community on the individual. One of the central concepts in Heidegger’s Being and Time is that of “das Man,” which is often translated as "the They" or "People" or "Anyone.” In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to the concept of “das Man” in explaining inauthentic modes of being human, in which one thinks or acts only because "that is what one does" or "that is what people do". Thus, “das Man” is not a particular entity, but rather an amorphous part of social reality that functions effectively in the manner that it does through this intangibility. See: Pulling the Normative Threads of Heidegger’s ‘Das Man’
The topic of day two will be Marshal McLuhan's insights into communications and information technology, paying particular attention to his aphorism, “the global village.” McLuhan originally popularized the phrase “the global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o/the Topographic Man (1962), asserting "[t]he new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." In War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), McLuhan examines the loss of personal identity resulting from every new extension of our central nervous system. He argues that "every new technology necessitates a new war" because technologies, specifically belonging to the current Electronic Age, "amputate part of ourselves" and endanger our identities both on a private and corporate level.” In referring to our electronic environments, McLuhan wrote that "[i]nformation and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session." See: The Whole Earth as Village
Day three will focus on Patrick McGoohan’s television show from 1967, The Prisoner, from the perspective of Heidegger’s “das Man” and McCluhan’s “the global village.” The setting for The Prisoner is a surrealistic dystopia known only as “the Village,” in which each member of this ostensibly democratic, international community is assigned a number and all are routinely monitored with electronic surveillance. See: Interview with Patrick McGoohan
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”