- 04 May 2020 20:12
#15089087
What is the relationship between language and reality?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htm
[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/what-is-a-subject/[/url]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03p.htm
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.
[url]braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/what-is-a-subject/[/url]
In his analysis, he describes the ego as a linguistic construction – just as we assume that an activity must have an actor, we assume that thinking must be done by a subject. A closer analysis shows that this is not the case, since thoughts are not produced “at will” – when a thought comes to one’s mind, who is the actor? We get confused about who we are, because we use language as if it were reality, and since we operate as masters within speech, we automatically assume that the ability to speak about reality also gives us the power to shape and transform this reality. But reality is not synonymous with language.
The reason for this confusion lies in the symbolic nature of the human subject. Language consists of a system of signifiers, and signifiers are a special class of non-natural signs. For them, the relation between the sign and what it signifies is not naturally determined; therefore signifiers can represent anything, even the void itself. Once humans begin to express themselves within language, by giving names to objects, or representing themselves within language through the pronoun “I,” a symbolic world of inner experience has been created. Symbols and signifiers that express the subject in relation to its environment are the materials that create meaning for us. The reality in which subjectivity constitutes itself is random and opaque; but the human being is a creature who is driven by this instinct to generate meaning, just like birds build nests. Everything that enters our lives becomes the material by which we create meaning and identity when it is translated into language. This meaning can range from mythologies, religions, philosophies and ideologies, to sophisticated scientific world-views. The events that form our lives are oftentimes trivial, random, or ugly, but they initialize our existence and make life real, not just a thought process. We begin to free ourselves from the randomness of these events by ritualizing them, repeating them, or assigning a meaning to them that originates in our needs rather than in reality itself. The constitution of subjectivity itself can be compared to the creation of a language. Signs become symbols when people use them in order to create their own definitions of what things are. Language, therefore, does not primarily describe reality for us; it mainly carries a system of order that originates in the human need to organize the world according to our needs.
A language cannot be created at will; a context of interpretation has to exist prior to the creation of any language. This implies that there is a dimensional shift, a gap between reality and language. Neither language nor the subject emerges continuously from reality; each comes into existence as a discontinuity. Once it exists, it transforms the reality within which it exists forever, because it creates new systems of signification which are themselves real. The human being is random, contingent, and nevertheless absolute. It bridges the gap between the symbolic order and the real: As ego it is an object of language, and at the same time it is the subject that speaks, the animal capable of language, and therefore caught up in a process of meaning-making. Language creates reality, but it is also a symbolic space that tries to mirror and describe “real” reality, that which lies outside the human mind. This duplication causes the confusion that has haunted our thinking for millennia, and has caused all kinds of philosophical errors.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics