Topics Philosophers

Question Excuse me, my English is not perfect. But I´ll try to make myself understood. I´m very interested in the problem, which Wittgenstein named "the bewitchment of our mind by language". I think, language is a cage inside we live, if we are not aware of its mechanisms. I want to ask you, if this topic is already investigated? Is there any explicit literature concerning it? Thank you very much. Yours sincerely. S.H.

Accepted:
July 3, 2010

Comments

Thank you for your question, which is a good one. It is not, however, clear what you mean in saying that language is a cage we inhabit. That presupposes that we have a reasonably clear idea what it would be to live outside of language. However, language is so integral to human thought and experience that it is not easy to understand what it might mean to live "outside" of language. Nevertheless, there is rich and rewarding work in the ways in which language can "bewitch" us. Some of that has been produced by adherents to the so-called Ordinary Language movement in philosophy. Gilbert Ryle was among them, and his book _Dilemmas_ is an accessible and intriguing discussion of the various problems that arise for thought when it is bewitched in the way that you allude to. Even though the book was published about a half-century ago, it still repays study today.

Mitch Green

"A picture held us captive," Wittgestein writes in the Philosophical Investigations, "and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language...." The sort of picture to which Wittgenstein is referring here consists of pre-philosophical assumptions about the nature of language, of mind, of knowledge that shape the kind of philosophical answers that are given to those questions. On one interpretation of Wittgenstein, his aim throughout his later writings--that is, the writings beginning with the Blue and Brown Books and continuing on to the end of his death, was to expose such pictures in order to break the hold that they had on the great early analytic philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Wittgenstein himself (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). On this reading of the later Wittgenstein, his later philosophy is largely 'therapeutic', aimed at enabling those inclined to philosophy--including himself!--to live content with a 'pictureless' approach to philosophical questions. Proponents of ordinary language philosophy, such as Ryle (in Dilemmas, cited by Mitch Green, as well as in the classic The Concept of Mind), as well as J. L. Austin, in various of his papers and his book Sense and Sensibiliia, also sought to undermine the 'pictures' embedded in language through close and detailed attention to language itself--hence they are considered to be part of the movement referred to by Mitch Green, as 'ordinary language philosophy'. (By the by, I do not consider Wittgenstein himself to be a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, although this is a vexed matter.) Although Wittgenstein and practitioners of ordinary language philosophy were, for the most part, concerned with problems in language and mind, concerns about the social and political implications of being imprisoned, as it were, in the prison house of language, have not been neglected, although they have been addressed largely by philosophers in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment engage the respect in which thoughts are shaped by the unnoticed influence of culture; French post-structuralist thought has been very interested in such issues as well: most notably, Michel Foucault investigated such issues in works such as Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and The Birth of the Prison. One deep question that emerges from the work of these Continental philosophers is how, even if their diagnoses of our situation are accurate, it might be possible to escape from the cages of language and concepts.