Herder's Treatise on the origin of language offers some really deep insights into the nature of language. Of course, contemporary philosophy on language will quickly dismiss the work of Herder as maybe too poetic, too unscientifical, too "pre-Saussurian". But, if I may sound Heideggerian for a brief moment, language in itself maybe is poetical and thus only what is of poetry can offer us language as such.
In his Treatise there are two sentences, expressing - only in a germ - the most astonishing aporia that comes to mind when thinking about language:
"How far can we go without language? What is that which we must think with language?"
These two sentences of course deal with a known problem of relationship between thought and language. Is thinking limited by language? Is pure thought, philosophy, science, mathematics, free of particular language constraints, or is it perhaps so deeply dependent upon language that any attempt to even think those constraints necesseraly fails?
Since Herder, there has been a lot of relevant texts written on this topic, one the most famoust being Benveniste's Categories of thought, categories of language and Derrida's consequent commentary. But I still haven't found a formulation of such density, as that of Herder just quoted.
What Herder asks is clear. In first sentence he poses a question concerning a limitation of thought, and in his second question he deals with the constraints that are internal to thought. It seems that in his first question - "how far can we go without language" - the problem is expressed extensionally, that is to say, it deals with the extension and reach of thought before it falls to barriers, imposed by language; and in his second sentence - "what is that which we must thought with language" he express the problem intensionally, in other words, he wants to define the positive content of thought that is necessary, when that thought is produced in language.
But on a closer inspection we see that we cannot grasp the full meaning of Herder's questions in terms of extension and intension. Herder's question - "how far can we go without language" - precisely cancels the terminology of barrier, constraint, extension and limitation. When one asks how far can one go without something one asks how far is possible to go with absence of something. So, that would mean that Herder is asking what is the limit of a thought that has ALREADY crossed the "limits" of language. What Herder's question imply - and this is the point that fascinates me - is that there is a constraint of a thought already free of any constraints . It seems that language returns with its limitations, its force of transformation, its power of superimposing, only when thought already succesfully escapes from its limitation. In other words, the relation between thought and language is put to a question only when thinking surpasses language, only when it claims an universal position above any particular linguistic expression. The repression of language is in force only when one already escape its grasp.
And that is precisely why Benveniste, when writing aforementioned article, chose as a example of his thesis a text that claims an universal status, a text that is far beyond the particularity of language: Aristotle's Categories. Only a text that eludes all of limitations posed by language serves as an adequate example of language's real limits, which are always evasive, ungraspable, changeable and misplaced.
This is why it's impossible to understand the precarious relation between language and thought as that of form and content, outside and inside, region and its limit. Does this imply that Wittgenstein's famous thesis - "the limits of my language are limits of my world" - misses the point? Of course not. What Wittgenstein meant is that although we can posit an identity between the limits of language and that of a world of things, those limits as such can never became be crossed. If I am precise, they can never become sayable. Limits of language are only showing themselves (in it's syntactical structure, in it's nature of representation) but as such cannot become scrutinized or theoretically graspable. And this is exactly what Herder's question imply - the absolute impossiblity of localisation of language's limits. Those limits are without location and produce no location. They do not mark a division of two things, they do not divide pre- or postlinguistical thought from that of language's. In this sense the world, in its ability to cancel every limitation or extension, completely coincides with the a-topos, produced by limits of language.
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Talking of limits language poses on pure thought such as mathematics: there is a nice example of Ramanujan and Hardy cooperation the beginning of 20th century. Ramanujan was an Indian college drop-out, who came up with several results that have stunned mathematicians. Ramanujan was never able to come up with a proof of his results, he was even unable to explain, how he arrived at the results he presented. Luckily Hardy, a well renowned mathematician, and an exponent of rigor in mathematics was able to prove some of the Ramanujan’s theorems.
Similarly, you as a seasoned chess player should be able to evaluate a chess board instantaneously, without the need for resorting to language and without much conscious analysis. But paired with a person, who does not play chess, like me, you would have to invest quite some time in explaining it to me, but even here you would perhaps be able only to convey some of the aspects.
If you were able to describe how you evaluate a chess board position and if your description (in language) is precise and accurate enough, then there is no reason, why a computer was not able to perform such an evaluation (you are probably aware, that the power of today’s chess computers is in their ability to analyze zillions of situations, they are not able to evaluate a chess board position without evaluating most of the possible outcomes, many moves in advance).
I am describing here two examples, where language is primarily communication tool, thinking occurs outside of our conscious process, and with that perhaps outside of the language. There are several things you can do, compose music, play chess, invent new mathematical theorems, find your way home, recognize a face, without resorting to language, but you will always be clearly limited by a language, when it comes to any kind of communication or cooperation. You cannot teach anyone how to compose, explain a certain chess move, prove a theorem, …, outside the language.
This might seem trivial, but it is a limit and hard one though, perhaps not on your thought itself but on ability of your thoughts to go beyond your physical limits (leaving mysticism aside).
Taking a broad view on language, as any kind of communication, of passing information, and subscribing to information theory view, that information can be measured by amount of communication needed to overcome the uncertainty about a situation, there would even be no thinking, no nothing, if there were not for some prime mover somewhere, shaking things up, stirring trouble and creating uncertainty. But when the Schrödinger’s cat takes a nap somewhere in this picture, we might have an idea perhaps, the uncertainty itself is what creates the changes and be happy that thermodynamics and information have something in common, as the equations suggest. Then language is (almost?) everything.
Talking of limits language poses on pure thought such as mathematics: there is a nice example of Ramanujan and Hardy cooperation the beginning of 20th century. Ramanujan was an Indian college drop-out, who came up with several results that have stunned mathematicians. Ramanujan was never able to come up with a proof of his results, he was even unable to explain, how he arrived at the results he presented. Luckily Hardy, a well renowned mathematician, and an exponent of rigor in mathematics was able to prove some of the Ramanujan’s theorems.
Similarly, you as a seasoned chess player should be able to evaluate a chess board instantaneously, without the need for resorting to language and without much conscious analysis. But paired with a person, who does not play chess, like me, you would have to invest quite some time in explaining it to me, but even here you would perhaps be able only to convey some of the aspects.
If you were able to describe how you evaluate a chess board position and if your description (in language) is precise and accurate enough, then there is no reason, why a computer was not able to perform such an evaluation (you are probably aware, that the power of today’s chess computers is in their ability to analyze zillions of situations, they are not able to evaluate a chess board position without evaluating most of the possible outcomes, many moves in advance).
I am describing here two examples, where language is primarily communication tool, thinking occurs outside of our conscious process, and with that perhaps outside of the language. There are several things you can do, compose music, play chess, invent new mathematical theorems, find your way home, recognize a face, without resorting to language, but you will always be clearly limited by a language, when it comes to any kind of communication or cooperation. You cannot teach anyone how to compose, explain a certain chess move, prove a theorem, …, outside the language.
This might seem trivial, but it is a limit and hard one though, perhaps not on your thought itself but on ability of your thoughts to go beyond your physical limits (leaving mysticism aside).
Taking a broad view on language, as any kind of communication, of passing information, and subscribing to information theory view, that information can be measured by amount of communication needed to overcome the uncertainty about a situation, there would even be no thinking, no nothing, if there were not for some prime mover somewhere, shaking things up, stirring trouble and creating uncertainty. But when the Schrödinger’s cat takes a nap somewhere in this picture, we might have an idea perhaps, the uncertainty itself is what creates the changes and be happy that thermodynamics and information have something in common, as the equations suggest. Then language is (almost?) everything.
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