Linguistic idealism
The term linguistic idealism (also linguistic idealism ; eng. Linguistic idealism ) includes linguistic philosophical positions according to which reality is at least in part linguistically generated. In the extreme case, linguistic idealism denies the existence of a language-independent reality. In contrast, advocates of linguistic realism assume that language is in a reference relationship to an extra- linguistic reality, i. H. that language does not create reality, but refers to already existing reality. Ultimately, both approaches try to find an answer to the fundamental question of the relationship between language and reality.
Humboldt's linguistic idealism
Already Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) conception of language as Ergon (work) and Energeia (activity) can attribute the linguistic idealism. With this distinction, borrowed from Aristotle , Humboldt tries to express that linguistic expressions are not simply assigned to certain objects, but that objects can only be formed within language. Our conception of reality is shaped by the way we talk about reality. According to Humboldt, linguistic categories such as morphology , syntax or semantics already form the respective "world view" that speakers of a common language share. The term "Ergon" denotes the static inventory of a language of world views that have already been acquired. This inventory is available in the form of terms and regulates the use of the language in each language. "Energeia", on the other hand, describes the reality-creating part of language.
“Language, understood in its real essence, is something permanent and in every moment temporary. Even their preservation through writing is always only an incomplete, mummy-like storage, which, after all, is necessary again for one to try to make the living lecture sensible. It is not itself a work (Ergon), but an activity (Energeia). Its true definition can therefore only be genetic. It is namely the eternally repetitive work of the mind to make the articulated sound capable of expressing thoughts. Immediately and strictly speaking, this is the definition of every time speaking; but in the true and essential sense one can only look at the totality of this speaking as language. "
With this conception, Humboldt contradicts a realistic conception of language, according to which linguistic expressions are simply (written or spoken) signs for suddenly perceived objects. Humboldt's linguistic idealism can be viewed as a linguistic-philosophical reformulation of the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant . As for Kant, for Humboldt the objects of our perception are not things in themselves, but always only appearances, i.e. H. Perception pre-structured by the conditions of possibility of experience. For thinking, perception only becomes available through concepts. According to Humboldt, however, concepts cannot be formed without language. Thus, reality, or at least our conception of it, is essentially language-dependent.
The energetic (procedural) language conception of Humboldt is explicitly shared by Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) in the 20th century . For Cassirer, too, language is more than a ready-made set of means of communication that can be used when needed. Language itself is the means by which reality is first opened up. In contrast to Humboldt, however, Cassirer attaches greater importance to the cultural technique of using symbols. According to Cassirer, without a possibility of structuring, perception would be fundamentally exposed to a chaos of sensual impressions. But by naming individual moments of sensual perception, we give it a meaningful structure. The naming itself happens through the binding of individual perceptual contents to signs. The sensual sign (symbol) thus becomes the carrier of a non-sensual content of meaning. Cassirer calls the activity of linking non-sensual meaning content with sensual signs "symbolic form". At the same time, "symbolic form" also means the result of a meaningful structuring of perception. The structuring itself is not arbitrary, but for Cassirer the symbolic forms are very specific basic forms of understanding the world. In addition to language, he also counts art or technology among the symbolic forms.
The problem with the basic conception shared by Humboldt and Cassirer that language plays a key role in the generation of reality is the fact that different worldviews or different forms of world understanding may not be compatible with one another. Ultimately, the speakers of a certain language would be denied access to the reality of the speakers of another language. However, in our everyday use of language, we assume that we roughly share the same concept of reality with speakers of our own and other languages. An incommensurability between different worldviews also brings with it the problem that terms such as truth, objectivity or reality can themselves only have meaning relative to a language or a community of speakers. However, these terms are used precisely in such a way that their meaning does not depend on the language of the respective speaker.
Language and social reality
Cassirer's academic teacher Georg Simmel (1858–1918) developed in his Philosophy of Money (1900) the thesis that human thinking and the conception of reality are determined by sociological variables such as money. Language plays a crucial role here. First of all, Simmel assumes that the fact that certain objects are assigned certain values is based on an immediate sensation. We can feel the aesthetic value of a work of art or the moral value of an action without first having to give it value. However, our attitude changes under economic conditions. The fact that various objects are given an economic value make them comparable and interchangeable with one another. For Simmel, in contrast to objective reality, in which values do not exist in the same sense as objects, this creates a second reality of value:
“Within this area, however, regardless of how it is constituted, the economic value takes the same peculiar position towards the individual objects that the value in general has: it is a world of its own that has its own concreteness of objects, within them classifies and ranks even norms that are not in place; the things, ordered and branched according to their economic values, form a completely different cosmos than their natural law, immediate reality does. "
Language is constitutive for this "completely different cosmos". Linguistically, we manage to create social facts such as money. The concept of social fact ( fait social ) goes back to the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who sees the objectivity of a social fact based on the compulsion that it exerts on each individual member of a social group and his actions. As a social fact, money belongs to the peculiar area of social ontology . According to Simmel, the value of money is only of a symbolic nature and is basically not tied to any material objectivity. Banknotes or coins are no more than technical aids for determining a value that they do not have as an object. Simmel even compares money in its function with the term: just as it ideally characterizes everything it stands for, so a certain sum of money also characterizes all economic buying and selling relationships that can be realized with it. In Simmel's words: "One of the functions of money is not just to represent the economic meaning of things in its own language, but to condense it." In order for money to be able to represent economic values at all, it is because we collectively assume that these values exist at all, and language plays a key role in this collective practice.
Even more than Simmel, John Searle emphasizes the constitutive function of language in generating social facts such as money. Searle differentiates between two types of facts: facts that are independent of our linguistic practice ( brute facts ) and facts that are dependent on it ( social facts ). In order to take into account the conventional linguistic context in which social facts can only arise, Searle finds the catchy formula: "X applies to Y in a context C". Searle's formula can be illustrated using the example of money: The brute fact paper or metal (X) becomes the social fact money for the individuals of a social group (Y), since it has a certain, symbolic-linguistic context (C) namely economic, importance is given.
Criticism of linguistic idealism
Even Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) work is marked by a sprachidealistischen view that is particularly in his pessimistic attitude towards the concept of truth expressed. Nietzsche criticizes linguistic idealism sharply, but is also not a representative of linguistic realism. His basic thesis regarding the relationship between language and reality is that language is used to create a second reality that has no reference relation to objective reality and itself has no claim to truth. According to Nietzsche, human life is embedded in a world of becoming, in which it can only survive if it opposes it with a world of the constant, which happens through language. In The Happy Science he writes:
“This has bothered me most, and it continues to bother me: to see that what matters is unspeakably more to what things are called than what they are. The reputation, name and appearance, the validity, the usual measure and weight of a thing - in its origin mostly an error and an arbitrariness, thrown on things like a dress and quite alien to its essence and even its skin - is due to belief in it and its growth from sex to sex gradually grew, as it were, into the thing and become its own body; the appearance from the beginning almost always becomes an essence and acts as an essence! What a fool it would be to think that it was enough to point out this origin and this foggy cover of madness in order to destroy the world that is considered to be essential, the so-called " reality " ! We can only destroy as creators! - But let's not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimates and probabilities in order to create new "things" in the long run. "
Since the world is always changing, but only static things can be expressed with language, the linguistic relationship to the world also removes people from the truth. Nietzsche's book On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense (1873) is dedicated to this conviction. On the basis of a genealogy of the concept of truth, Nietzsche carries out a critique of knowledge and language: For Nietzsche, language is a social phenomenon that, as such, is subject to certain conventions. A speaking community as a community determines the meaning of the expressions in their language. Nietzsche gives the grammatical genera as an example : It is completely arbitrary that the tree is male or the plant is female. With the conventions of language, according to Nietzsche, the foundation stone is laid for a conventional concept of truth, which finds its expression above all in the opposition of truth and lies. Those who stick to the conventional language understanding of a speaking community are telling the truth. On the other hand, those who do not keep the conventions are lying. But since language is never used to express reality in its actual form, namely as becoming, for Nietzsche truth is "a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which, poetically and rhetorically, and which, after long use, appear to a people firm, canonical and binding: the truths are illusions that have been forgotten that they are ". According to Nietzsche, conventional linguistic usage is accompanied by a social obligation to lie, i. H. to talk about reality as an enduring reality. In Nietzsche's words: "To be truthful, that is, to use the usual metaphors, that is to say in moral terms: [...] to lie according to a fixed convention".
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Prechtl: Philosophy of Language . Stuttgart 1999, p. 52
- ^ Wilhelm von Humboldt: "About comparative language studies in relation to the different epochs of linguistic development", in: Wilhelm von Humboldt: Gesammelte Schriften (Academy edition), Vol. IV. Berlin 1903-1936.
- ^ Wilhelm von Humboldt: Writings on language . Stuttgart 2007, p. 36.
- ↑ Cf. Cristina Lafont: The Linguistic Turn in Hermeutic Philosophy. Cambridge (MA) and London 1999, chap. 2.
- ↑ See Jochem Hennigfeld: "Language as a world view. Humboldt - Nietzsche - Whorf", in: Journal for philosophical research 30, 1976, pp. 435–451.
- ^ Ernst Cassirer: "The Kantian elements in Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language", in: Festschrift for Paul Hensel . Greiz i. V. 1923.
- ↑ Ernst Cassirer: "Substance Concept and Function Concept", in: Ernst Cassirer: Werkausgabe, Vol. 6. Hamburg 2000, p. 161.
- ↑ Cristina Lafont: The Linguistic Turn in Hermeutic Philosophy , p. 36.
- ↑ Georg Simmel: Philosophy of Money . Berlin [1900] 2013, p. 132.
- ↑ Ibid., P. 180.
- ↑ Cf. Dirk Westerkamp: "Language", in: Ralf Konersmann (ed.): Handbuch Kulturphilosophie . Stuttgart 2012, 252-263.
- ^ John Searle: The Construction of Social Reality . New York 1995, p. 65.
- ↑ Hennigfeld: "Language as a world view", p. 442
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science . Frankfurt a. M. [1882 & 1887] 2000, § 58.
- ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche: "About truth and lies in the extra-moral sense", in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Critical study edition , vol. 1. Munich 1999, p. 880 f.
- ↑ Ibid.