Language skepticism

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Language skepticism is the name given to the doubts many authors of the late 19th and 20th centuries had about the fact that reality could be objectively recognized and represented with the help of linguistic and literary means. This made the traditional role of language questionable.

This problem becomes the subject of many works for many authors and poets of Junge Wien . Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke (poem: I am so afraid of the human word , 1899) claim that a “higher truth” can be expressed only through poetic language. In his letter from Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon , published in 1902 , Hugo von Hofmannsthal had the letter writer say: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak about anything coherently. The linguistic-skeptical poets noted a break between language and reality, which in their eyes could not be bridged. Some poets therefore withdrew, in line with the L'art-pour-l'art idea (art for art's sake), into their own counter-world of art, while others consequently gave up writing literature entirely.

On the other hand, the attitude of language skepticism and the retreat into an art world was criticized by realistic and naturalistic poets as an escape into the ivory tower , i.e. as an escape to a spiritual place of seclusion and untouchedness from the world. Instead, they looked for new linguistic ways to adequately describe reality.

Theoretically, the language skepticism was mainly based on the language-philosophical theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Fritz Mauthner . Even Nietzsche played a role in this, as he did in his works many comments on this issue and set up their own theories. According to Nietzsche, the ambivalence of the situation is contradictory to the uniqueness of the term. The form of language skepticism addressed by Nietzsche is above all a comprehensive critique of perception and knowledge.

literature

  • Christopher Ebner: Language skepticism and language crisis. Fritz Mauthner's philosophy of language in the context of modernity . 2014. ISBN 3-84289537-2
  • Martina King: Language crisis . In: Handbook of literature and philosophy. Stuttgart: Metzler 2012. pp. 159–177. ISBN 978-3-476-02253-0