Language: The ‘Bewitchment Of Our Intelligence’

‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by language’, wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein,‘the limits of my Language are the limits of my World’

‘In the beginning was the Word’. The World begins in Vac [Sanskrit]; Vox [Latin; Voice].

The two favored children of Sign, the riotous pair, are Language and Logic.

Your irrepressibly cute English Teacher would have drilled this into you as a kid: Language begins in a division of ‘Subject’ and Object’. Once that is established everything else follows. Noun and Verb; Present and Past; SIngular and Plural; Gender and Tense.

Words like ‘of’ and ‘for’, ‘to’ and ‘from’, ‘and’ and ‘or’, create a sanctioned and structured web of associations and divisions. And we are to be forgiven if we take this synthetic structure as intrinsic to the way the World is, the way the World works.

Language maps the World in it’s own image. It draws the boundaries, shades the colors. And it is a self-sufficient mapped World that is very good at explaining itself to itself.

The language you ‘think-in’ is the unexamined repository of a millennia of influences. What ideas and things did the culture see as worth labeling? What distinctions did the culture see as worth marking? [Eskimos famously have a dozen names for Snow and the modern Investment-Banker, a dozen names for Money.]

Language creates the convention of legitimate distinctions that allow discourse. It draws the lines in the socio-linguistic matrix. Reality carved in familiar ways is ceaselessly reinforced. A self-created line, repeated, entrenched, is now seen as a self-evident divide.