Hector Martinez Sanz

The Dogma of Meaning Hector Martinez Sanz

In The dogma of meaning, Héctor Martínez explains that Western philosophy, since Plato and Aristotle, has developed around the existential demand that if life has value, then it must have meaning. Its meaning is its value. This demand for meaning, as an exclusive demand of the human being, has not been questioned throughout the history of philosophy due to the linguistic bias of thought: a prejudice of a philosophy that begins to think with words and ends up taking words and their meaning (sense) as the object of its philosophizing; a philosophy that began by asking about reality, deviated when trying to explain reality, and in the end understood that the meaning of the linguistic discourse with which it explains reality is the answer to the first question. Explanation and meaning have been linked ever since as substitutes for reality, because every time that we talk about reality we use words and its meanings which we are looking for console. Meaning has only been questioned in its various named manifestations (religious, anthropocentric, scientific...), but the demand for meaning, which arises from the fear of death, has remained. The author opposes it with a vitalist attitude that gives value to life in itself, without displacing its foundation outside life and the present moment in which it develops. Throughout this short essay, in addition to summoning well-known names (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, Bergson or Heidegger), he supports his reflection mainly on lesser-known or marginal thinkers such as Wessel Zapffe, George Canguilhem, Ayn Rand, Giorgio Colli, Rudiger Safranski or E. M. Cioran.