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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience ===================================================================================== Over the last several chapters, we have seen how the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language has led it repeatedly to experience the failures and paradoxes of its attempt to envision language as a total structure of signs.

This withdrawal of language at the point of its own positive description occurs repeatedly in the history of the tradition, and marks in a fundamental way the most prominent results of its consideration of the basis and nature of linguistic meaning. The analytic tradition’s inquiry into language begins with the attempt to demonstrate the philosophical relevance of what at first seems self-evident, our ordinary access to the language that we speak.

It ends, as we have seen over the last several chapters, by demonstrating the inherent and pervasive ambiguities of this access, not only in the theories of philosophers but in its everyday forms as well. In the demonstration, what had been self-evident becomes less so; the aporias of the explicit, theoretical attempt to grasp the structure of language reveal the underlying and pervasive ambiguities of our ordinary relationship to it.

The inherent problems of the structuralist picture of language thereby become opportunities for the renewed posing of a set of critical questions about the linguistic basis of the practices and circumstances of an ordinary life. These critical consequences of the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language come to the fore especially when this inquiry is set in a broader philosophical and historical context.

To this end, in this chapter, I examine another prominent twentieth-century reflection on language, one that, although seldom well understood by analytic philosophers, experiences much the same withdrawal of language and explicitly draws from it some far-ranging critical consequences about contemporary social and technological practices.