Anthony asked:

To what extent does language obfuscate our vision of ourselves? While it is of undoubted relevance
to our interactions with other people, I feel that people rely on it to 'converse' with themselves. Why is
it needed when we think to ourselves, given that the act of forming a feeling into words will always
lose something in translation. I don't believe it is necessary. Relying on language to explain our own
feelings to ourselves will ultimately distance us from our true selves. Often, the first thing we feel is
the right thing eventually. Do we not trust our instincts? is this concentration on language a result of
modern man's immersion in the physical world?

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The question of language is probably the dominant philosophical question of the twentieth century.
Heidegger said, "all thinking is experience with language" (On the Nature of Language). There is no
thinking about language outside it. Language can never be something merely at hand, like a tool,
because we are always init, like an element or a universe. Objectivity is a stance taken up within the
sphere of language, which uses language after a particular prefabricated fashion. In Heidegger's
words, one has always already been "claimed" by language, by the very questions we ask, which
reflect our experience of language (as far as it goes). Our relation to language is the same as our
relation to all that is."No matter how we put our questions to language about its nature, first of all it is
needful that language vouchsafe itself to us. If it does, the nature of language becomes the grant of
its essential being, that is, the being of language become the language of being" (ibid.).

The idea here is a bit like that of the later Wittgenstein, who came to see that "the meaning of a word
is its use in language," (Philosophical Investigations) and that the use of language belongs to whole
"forms of life". For instance, scientists derive the meaning of their words from the way that they are
used within their professional world. Moreover, this world bespeaks a stance to beings as a whole,
that of the methodologist. 'Things' therefore show up in a scientific light. The same things may be
quite otherwise for the poet. Our stance in language is language's "claim" upon us. Language grants
itself to us in different ways according to our stance.

The great danger with questions of language, and I fear your questions reflect this, is the fallacy of
subjectivism on one hand and logic (in the positivistic sense) on the other. Language is not words
which form a 'picture' of the world, or which stand for 'things' in that world or in oneself. Language is
not a matter of the first person singular (the ego). Then language falls out of its own element (which is
the Being of beings according to Heidegger or forms of life according to Wittgenstein) and becomes
conceived in terms of psychology and subjectivism. Language remains a matter in question and any
straightforward answers, especially of an analytical nature, would be preemptive.

Matthew Del Nevo
www.sicetnon.com