| 13 | VAMPIRES |
“Is someone here a vampire? How sure are we that nobody in this lecture hall is a vampire?” I often put this question to my classes as soon as I walk in.
Because, has there ever been a scientific experiment demonstrating that vampires don’t exist? No. The moment never came when someone explained once and for all that vampires don’t exist. At a certain point, we simply forgot it. We don’t bother with it anymore; it doesn’t worry us. That problem went out of fashion.
This is an example of “historical paradigm.” There are epochs in which people really believe that there are witches and that they should be burned, and they don’t end when it’s scientifically proved that witches don’t exist. We stop believing in them, that’s all.
It’s the same as what Thomas Kuhn, the American philosopher of science, writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He maintains and explains how science can only proceed within certain frameworks of assumption. Therefore there is no real continuity or cumulativity in science, exactly the way there is no cumulativity in time and history for Heidegger.
Jacques Derrida even thinks that history does not exist. So does Emmanuel Levinas, come to that.
Different paradigms. Occurrences. Flashes.