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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) IV.

CONCLUSION Chapter 9: The Question of Language "Now I am tempted to say, that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself." -Wittgenstein[^427] If there is such a thing as language, the historical singularity of the analytic tradition lies in its ambition to lay it open to view, and so to render its underlying principles, the form and order of its terms, and the basis of its possibilities of meaning open to philosophical criticism.

The unprecedented envisioning of language that the analytic tradition undertook from its first stages would, if successful, have delivered the human “capacity” for linguistic meaning to philosophical thought as an explicit object of description. In so doing, it would have revealed language as the previously unthought ground of the expressive possibilities of a human life, the source of its deepest possibilities of clarity and the root of its most threatening illusions.

Yet as we have seen, the critical discourse that originally sought to produce a clarified life by policing the bounds of sense could not foreclose a more problematic encounter with the pervasive question of the basis of its own authority.

Thus, with a necessity that is the same as that of reason’s own reflection on its inherent forms, the analytic tradition’s modalities of linguistic analysis and interpretation became more and more involved in the underlying problems of our everyday access to language itself. Over the course of this work, I have sought to document some of these problems as they have arisen, and exerted their effects, upon the texts and questions of twentieth-century philosophy.

They are apparent, most of all, in relation to the structuralist picture of language whose detailed pursuit evinced them as theoretical results in the projects of philosophers like Quine and Wittgenstein.

But since, as I have also attempted to show, this picture is already implicit in the first self-reflective words of ordinary language, the problems that these projects demonstrate are by no means limited to the philosophically special project of “explaining” or “accounting for” our understanding of language.