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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) Introduction: Language and Structure ======================================= We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking.

These latter activities seem to take place in a queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don’t quite understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism could … Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper.

Frege’s idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live.

And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs. But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use .[^1] If language grants the possibility of sense to a human life, then the systematic inquiry into its structure consigns this life to an ambiguous basis in the relation of signs to their meanings.

For as soon as it becomes the object of systematic analysis, the totality of language both demands and refuses completion by a principle of meaning exterior to its own economy. Wittgenstein’s text, written in 1933 or 1934 as part of a series of notes intended for his students at Cambridge, identifies the desire for such a completion in the thought of his great philosophical progenitor, Frege.

The anxiety to which this desire responds is one of death, specifically a death of sense in the materiality of the sign.