There was a time when I didn’t have any compass on the world. Actually I had been brought up in an entirely different situation, which I’d had a very strong orientation for. But an age where you are supposed to use your very strong intuitive mind to lay down roots that are subjective, and to expand your branches toward the outside world in a way that is objective, I was suddenly uprooted.

Then I was put in a place, sort of semi upside-down — really badly planted. And the soil was arid. Plus every dog began to piss on me.

Those times were hard. I tried to kick-start my subjectivity again by going for religion in a big way. But that only increased my stress and made me more at odds with the environment. Plus now there were not only dogs but also cats coming along to piss on me.

Then I had one problem after another, because my orientation to the world was so bad. Plus my father took umbrage to this, and started to pull the remaining two or three leaves off my tree as punishment for such a drastic failure.

But right in the middle of everything totally making the least sense to me, I discovered the philosophy of Nietzsche. This was really useful to me, because finally I had a means to develop a subjective orientation. At this time I was being heavily chastised in the workplace: “Your leaves look yellow and sickly, you seem to have been planted upside down, and you make us feel like we want to throw up all over you. Here is some more poison for your roots!”

I didn’t understand much of what I was reading back then, but the ideas seemed very useful to re-orient my emotions to my new situation. I began putting them into action. And weirdly, in a very short period of time, my leaves started to turn green. I almost felt like my roots were starting to pull in water, and later some nutrients. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but it felt good.

I kept working on developing my subjectivity, through trial and error. Nothing I did made sense to other people, but it made sense to me.

My previous culture had contended heavily against developing strong subjectivity, especially for women. Negative emotions like fear, rage, or sadness, would have made me less marriageable. In my teen years, I was taught never to aggression, as this would cause my father to explode in punitive rage. So, I had learned to attack myself when I even felt a very slight upsurging of aggression. In my mind’s eye, I could already feel father’s dark hand my father’s hand rising to strike me. So I attacked myself, making myself sick, pale and weak.

But through philosophy I learned that subjectivity is strength. We can’t even be physically well without subjectivity. If we don’t have access to it, we get sick very easily.

In my case, which some may count as extreme, I learned to tolerate subjectivity very gradually, by trying things that previously had been forbidden to me due to my strict upbringing. I did very small things that I had previously understood to be worthy of punishment, like practiced telling a small lie. When nothing happened to me as a result of this, I felt much safer and more at ease in my own body.

I have also gone back to Nietzsche’s philosophy more recently, because I lost my way. And almost immediately, he spoke to me directly in his strange language and turned my roots toward the ground again, away from the sky.

So this was my own experience of become more inured to subjectivity in terms of philosophy.

They might in general be more inclined to speak directly, and less ironically than recent French philosophers.

With regard to French culture, it may be very difficult to pick up on its cultural contradictions, which furnish its nuances. The French adopt a very revolutionary position, which is however also marked by extreme conservatism. What this means is that something may come across as very playful and even mocking of tradition, whilst demanding to be taken with utter seriousness.

In my experience, modern Anglo-Saxon culture has little time for this complexity. If one speaks irreverently, or in a manner of seeming mocking, this is a sign that one is “badly brought up” or doesn’t know what one is talking about. But French philosophy itself has little time for moral scolds.

On the other hand if you read Nietzsche the way he is supposed to be read, he sounds more French than English. Every second paragraph contains a joke, or a point of humor by way of ironic comparison. This is of course different from Kant, or Hegel, Heidegger, or Schopenhauer, who all demand to be taken very seriously, which is to say in a scholastic manner. Nietzsche’ style of seriousness, by contrast, is more in the manner that if you do not laugh you will cry — Nietzsche tries to get us “beyond crying” — beyond trivial seriousness.

But, in the conclusion, having analyzed my own argument, I would say that is is the seeming moral portentousness of the German philosophers that appeals to the Anglo-Saxon taste, whereas the French philosophers leave them at best confused, and at worst spinning.

It depends on what you mean by the limits of “phenomenology”, as Husserl was quite specific.

Certainly, though, language is restrictive in terms of what can be said. One of the reasons for this, as Nietzsche points out, is that language itself always abstracts from what is real. When we use the same term to refer to more than one person, we are automatically engaging in abstraction. For instance if we say, “Men (males) are like this…” we are reducing a whole lot of very rich and complex experiences down to one simple formulation, and thus thinning the overall meaning, making it more formulaic and indeed less rich.”

The other aspect of how language limits meanings has to do with what the structuralists and post-structuralists have found, which is that social relationships take place in a broader context of powerful systems, and that in turn, these systems themselves limit what can “reasonably” be said. (That is, what can be said without appearing “unreasonable”).

For instance, I have in my own way tried to outline that there is a difference in the need for feminism in the more extremely patriarchal cultures (such as in the developing world), but this assertion absolutely ALWAYS falls in deaf ears in the developed world, since I am considered to be speaking about things that have no real meaning in the “real world”. (But then the “real world” is implicitly defined as the developed world, where people presumably have no such issues to address, and so .my response is therefore deemed “unreasonable”..)

So, yes, certainly, language is restrictive and more narrowly codified than what it is possible to express in terms that are “reasonable”.

But From the opposite perspective, there are experiences one may have that do not gain a meaning, nor a context, unless they are somehow codified in language. (The issue of language and how we use it is indeed very complex.)

Taking my previous example, someone like myself, who experienced most of my own developing years in a less-industrialized country, would not know that aggression against my attempt to develop an intellectual life for myself was based in notions about gender, (unless I had a concept for it.) Words that carry complex concepts can be very liberating, because they enable you to take an aerial perspective on one’s life and see that is really occurring. These words can favor one’s own political struggles and impart a sense of the power to overcome the limitations of what life has had to offer.

But in the end, over-reliance on words and concepts is the more common trap, and it can lead to a deadening of life — a recourse to mere form over content.

It depends on what you mean by the limits of “phenomenology”, as Husserl was quite specific.

Certainly, though, language is restrictive in terms of what can be said. One of the reasons for this, as Nietzsche points out, is that language itself always abstracts from what is real. When we use the same term to refer to more than one person, we are automatically engaging in abstraction. For instance if we say, “Men (males) are like this…” we are reducing a whole lot of very rich and complex experiences down to one simple formulation, and thus thinning the overall meaning, making it more formulaic and indeed less rich.”

The other aspect of how language limits meanings has to do with what the structuralists and post-structuralists have found, which is that social relationships take place in a broader context of powerful systems, and that in turn, these systems themselves limit what can “reasonably” be said. (That is, what can be said without appearing “unreasonable”).

For instance, I have in my own way tried to outline that there is a difference in the need for feminism in the more extremely patriarchal cultures (such as in the developing world), but this assertion absolutely ALWAYS falls in deaf ears in the developed world, since I am considered to be speaking about things that have no real meaning in the “real world”. (But then the “real world” is implicitly defined as the developed world, where people presumably have no such issues to address, and so .my response is therefore deemed “unreasonable”..)

So, yes, certainly, language is restrictive and more narrowly codified than what it is possible to express in terms that are “reasonable”.

But From the opposite perspective, there are experiences one may have that do not gain a meaning, nor a context, unless they are somehow codified in language. (The issue of language and how we use it is indeed very complex.)

Taking my previous example, someone like myself, who experienced most of my own developing years in a marginally-industrialized country, would not know that aggression against my attempt to develop an intellectual life for myself was based in notions about gender, unless I had a concept for it. Words that carry complex concepts can be very liberating, because they enable you to take an aerial perspective on one’s life and see that is really occurring. These words can favor one’s own political struggles and impart a sense of the power to overcome the limitations of what life has had to offer.

But in the end, over-reliance on words and concepts is the more common trap, and it can lead to a deadening of life — a recourse to mere form over content.

It depends on what you mean by the limits of “phenomenology”, as Husserl was quite specific.

Certainly, though, language is restrictive in terms of what can be said. One of the reasons for this, as Nietzsche points out, is that language itself always abstracts from what is real. When we use the same term to refer to more than one person, we are automatically engaging in abstraction. For instance if we say, “Men (males) are like this…” we are reducing a whole lot of very rich and complex experiences down to one simple formulation, and thus thinning the overall meaning, making it more formulaic and indeed less rich.”

The other aspect of how language limits meanings has to do with what the structuralists and post-structuralists have found, which is that social relationships take place in a broader context of powerful systems, and that in turn, these systems themselves limit what can “reasonably” be said. That is what can be said without appearing “unreasonable”.

For instance, I have in my own way tried to outline that there is a difference in the need for feminism in the more extremely patriarchal cultures (such as in the developing world), but this assertion absolutely ALWAYS falls in deaf ears in the developed world, since I am considered to be speaking about things that have no real meaning in the “real world”. (But then the “real world” is implicitly defined as the developed world, where people presumably have no such issues to address, and so .my response is therefore deemed “unreasonable”..)

So, yes, certainly, language is restrictive and more narrowly codified than what it is possible to express in terms that are “reasonable”.

But From the opposite perspective, there are experiences one may have that do not gain a meaning, nor a context, unless they are somehow codified in language. (The issue of language and how we use it is indeed very complex.)

Taking my previous example, someone like myself, who experienced most of my own developing years in a marginally-industrialized country, would not know that aggression against my attempt to develop an intellectual life for myself was based in notions about gender, unless I had a concept for it. Words that carry complex concepts can be very liberating, because they enable you to take an aerial perspective on one’s life and see that is really occurring. These words can favor one’s own political struggles and impart a sense of the power to overcome the limitations of what life has had to offer.

But in the end, over-reliance on words and concepts is the more common trap, and it can lead to a deadening of life — a recourse to mere form over content.