The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 10

The third rung is language as a medium with its own ontological status that either reflects reality, constitutes reality, or speaks through the subject who believes himself to be speaking.

The rung has a strange history. Gestures toward it appear very early. Heraclitus called the world's ordering principle Logos, and the word carries both "speech"

and "reason"; the principle that governs things at the same time articulates them. The Stoics developed this into a full doctrine of the cosmic Logos. The Gospel of John opens by identifying the Logos with God and with the agent of creation. Each of these is technically a sixth-rung ontologization that happens to use language as its image, rather than an ontologization of language itself.

The third rung proper, with language as the medium that does the philosophical work, waited for the twentieth century, and then it arrived everywhere at once.

Three independent lines converged on the ontologization of language in the first half of the twentieth century, and a fourth radicalized it in the second half.

The first line is the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. A proposition is a picture of a fact. It shares its logical form with what it depicts. The totality of true propositions is the core of natural science, which is the sum of what can be said.

What cannot be put into this pictorial form cannot be said at all and has to be shown — ethics, aesthetics, the mystical, the sense of the world. The machinery here is austere and the ontologization exact: language and reality share a logical skeleton, and philosophy's task is to clarify it. The rung is fixed and the substrate is a formal structure common to both sides.

Then there was Heidegger with the famous language is the house of being. Being speaks through language, and the human being is the one through whom this speaking occurs when it is not covered over by ordinary usage. Poetry is the privileged site of authentic speech as the poet listens to the language. Philosophy's task is to attend to the saying of being when the instrumental and tech-42

THE VANISHING POINT: A LEFT-HAND PATH READING OF

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nical attitudes step aside. The ontologization is maximal: language is the site where reality comes into its own. The third rung absorbs the sixth as a special case — being, the would-be sixth-rung content, is accessible only through language. The third rung claims jurisdiction over what used to be the top floor.

For Saussure and structuralism a language is a system of differences without positive terms. Each sign derives its identity from its place in the network of contrasts with other signs, not from any relation to a thing it names. Saussure himself kept this as a thesis about linguistics, with the ontological implications restrained, but his successors removed the restraint. Lévi-Strauss extended the model to kinship, myth, and cuisine; Lacan applied it to the unconscious; Barthes spread it to fashion, photography, and mass culture. The claim that language is a differential system without positive terms became a statement that every cultural domain is such a system, which eventually led to the assertion that reality as experienced by human beings is structured by differential systems

— that is, by language-like structures whose terms have no existence outside their relations. The third rung is now holding up the roof of the cultural sciences.

The fourth line radicalized the third. Derrida declared that the differential structure of the sign prevents any sign from ever fully achieving determinate meaning, as it always defers to other signs, which defer in turn, without reaching a stable ground. Il n'y a pas de hors-texte: there is nothing outside the text in the sense that every supposed access to a reality outside language is itself a move within a textual system. Foucault treated discursive formations as constitutive of what can be known and done at a given period. Both thinkers converted the third rung from a hypothesis about how language relates to reality into a claim that reality is a function of language. Postmodern theory, in the form in which it reached the general humanities, runs on this radicalized version.

A parallel development in mid-century linguistics and anthropology produced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which the structure of a given language determines or constrains the categories of thought available to its speakers. The strong form of it has not survived empirical testing, and the weak form reduces to a platitude; but the popular version entered general intellectual culture.

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Across all four lines, the pattern is the one we have been tracking. The system of linguistic codes as a product of recursive distinction, extracted by the subject from the comparison of communicative practices, is adopted as a feature of reality. Each version traced here makes language do more work than the previous one, culminating in a position that subordinates everything else to the linguistic rung.

The countermove came from within the first line. The later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations abandoned the picture theory that his earlier self had proposed. The meaning of a word is not given by a timeless correspondence to a thing or a logical form but by its use in a language-game. It is embedded in the practices, activities, and shared ways of doing things that give the game its point. The essence of language turns into a family resemblance of overlapping uses. Language is no longer a medium with an ontological job description; it is a variegated set of practices, each one learned in context and applied without needing a theory of meaning to authorize it.

Wittgenstein noticed that the third-rung ontologization rests on extracting a general theory of meaning from what is in fact a motley of concrete practices, and he refused to perform the extraction. But his forms of life, in the later work, function as an unanalyzed bedrock: one must accept them as the ground on which language-games rest, and the philosopher who attempts to dig deeper is making a mistake about what philosophy can do. The ontologization has been pushed out of language and into forms of life. A cleaner version of the same move would examine the form of life itself as a structure drawn by distinguishing subjects and held in place by practices they could modify.

Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation dissolved the idea of language as a system with fixed meanings that could be mapped onto reality. Davidson's later work argued against the scheme-content dualism (the picture on which a conceptual scheme organizes a neutral content) and by extension against the thought that languages are incommensurable windows onto the same world. Both erode the third rung from the analytic side, and stop short of asking about the operation by which the rung came to be populated in the first place.