LANGUAGE AND THE WORLD AS SUCH

The subject of language has been sort of “my own” ever since my Moscow University years. I used to study all important linguistic theories from Ivan (Jan) Baudouin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure to Louis Hjelmslev, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Noam Chomsky, and Yuri Lotman. One thing unhappily missing from my university curriculum however was Nietzsche’s take on linguistics: as original and insightful as the best of modern linguistic theories.

And here is our case in point. The following passage from Nietzsche’s Menschliches #11, is of a monumental linguistic and philosophical significance as he argues about the role of language as a credible representation of the world as-such… or, well, maybe not…

Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that in language man juxtaposed to the one world another one, of his own, a place which he thought was so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations, making himself lord over it. To the extent that man believed over long periods of time in concepts and names of things as though they were aeternae veritates he has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world. (On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense.) The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving things labels. Rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of things with words; and in fact language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too, it is the belief in found truth, from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly it is only now dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error. Happily, it is too late to be able to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief.

And now Nietzsche makes an all-important generalization putting language in the same class with logic and mathematics, and demonstrating their abstracting detachment from reality.

Logic, too, rests on assumptions not corresponding to anything in the real world, like on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated, had it been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure.

The question, of course, remains, whether language (not in the sense of a labeling gun, but as a repository of the Kantian aprioris and such), along with man-made logic and mathematics, amounts to anything which can be proven as an “objective reality.”

…The answer is much more elusive than generally expected, and Nietzsche is hardly going to provide it for us, but he does offer a powerful push for the philosophy of linguistics in the right direction, to quicken our linguistic sensibilities more effectively than any bona fide professional linguist has been able to do so far.