Warning: Amazing, electrifying, extravagant, and spectacular philosophy content ahead.
The term "false friend", or false cognate, in languages describes a word or expression in one language that looks very much like one in a different language, yet does not have the same meaning as that similar word.
Two examples from English and German are:
Rat - advice or counsel in German, a rat in English
Apart - distinctive, unusual in German, separate in English
But there are other words, sensation being one of them, which have a large but not full overlap in meaning, creating sometimes tantalizing insights.
German and English meanings of sensation overlap in the area of expression of dramatic emotions -- see the Warning above.
The reason for this close relationship is the origin of the term, rooted in late Latin.
You found a YouTube sensation and want to tell a German friend about it? Nothing could be easier, just capitalize and add a hyphen: YouTube-Sensation.
The same approach works for adjectives, for instance, a sensational circus performance is nothing short of sensationell in German.
We have yet to address the other aspect of sensation, that of feeling, of immediate bodily stimulation (that's how Webster's explains it).
German and English usage has diverged in this area. In English, use of sensation to describe immediate bodily stimulation is extremely wide spread.
You might even feel a tingling sensation in your brain as you read this.
In German, that physical sense is relegated to the outer reaches of medical specialist lingo, kept alive largely through the influence of English language medical journals and books.
Finally, here is the philosophy content!
A major German paper had a long article in its feuilleton section, the culture pages, decrying how contemporary German society has become a sensation hungry crowd of thrill seeking citizens.
Not only was this a classic teutonic doom 'n gloom scenario but the author, a full professor of philosophy, based the whole reasoning on, in his words, the evolution of the term sensation from the original 'tactile', 'bodily' stimulus to the series of adjectives in our Warning note and beyond.
As an English speaker, you might say what the bleep?
And you would be right.
There are many substantial arguments to substantiate claims of a sensationalized public discourse, but claiming the use of the German word Sensation as an indicator of said cultural decline is bunk.
But wait, the man is a professor of philosophy, how can he go so astray, even if we make the we all make mistakes allowance?
Heidegger
Yes, the maestro of 20th Century teutonic philosophy is our favorite culprit. In fairness, though, he didn't have much choice because the great questions of philosophy have been tossed around for thousands of years and modern philosophical discourse has been going deeper and deeper into the nooks and crannies of their respective language once they had written starkly beautiful thoughts about the meaning of the latest technological innovation.
Heidegger's work, though, is a beauty when it comes to the gratuitous inflation of language.
Take a deep breath and read this: And this helps us to grasp the meaning of
Heidegger's otherwise opaque claim that Dasein, and indeed only
Dasein, exists, where existence is understood (via
etymological considerations) as ek-sistence, that is, as a
standing out.
The only reason this sentence makes any sort of vague sense if that English and German are close enough to play with the word "existence".
Other postulates of the maestro fall flat outside of the German language and are largely semi-sensical in their native ono-whatever environment. Choke on this: "Entfernen besagt ein Verschwindenmachen der Ferne, das heißt der Entferntheit von etwas, Näherung."
In a nutshell, he redefines the act of "distancing" or "going away" to "getting closer" through the utterly infantile artificial splitting up of "entfernen" into a prefix "ent" (de, dis) and "fernen" (distance).
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