Väljamõeldiste vadin, reaalsuse vaikus
The chattering of fictions, the silence of reality

Summary/Abstract: There is a widespread conception that the human being, this Homo symbolicus, is the sort of curious creature who always and inevitably inhabits a separate world of culture and thus has access to the things of the world only through culturally specific representations, traditions, habits, through language or other similar categories provided solely by the mind. The statement “nature is culturally constructed” has become a mantra. Humans are perceived as if closed off into a separate realm of being, comprised of language, mental categories, cultural representations, etc.; that this world is as if completely separate from the world of things and of non-linguistic beings; and that these representations or categories constitute an inevitable veil that covers the gaze of man, a framework which, superimposed on the meaningless flux of experience, indeed comprises the very objects of sense, but behind which the things and phenomena of the world remain forever hidden. This way of thinking has a history. The separation between self and others, individual consciousness and external objects, thought and world is a widespread metaphysical conception that forms one of the mainstays of Western philosophy and the humanities. Over time, these two sides have been pushed ever farther: they were first imagined as a separation, then a contradiction, and finally a complete incommensurability between the world of things and the world of language, giving rise to the most common version of this dualistic thinking today: the neat separation between nature and culture. The paper provides a brief historical overview of the development of the metaphysics of “two worlds” and indicates some of the problems it gives rise to.

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