We in the west are frequently confronted with dialectcs: “good” vs. “evil,” “just” vs. “unjust”, “us” vs. “them.” Many of these come to us through the western tradition of Platonism and the scholastic tradition, which saw the world as something faithfully captured by our philosophical models. For them, the observation that A=A was an indisputable principle of God’s universe, from which all else could be deduced, captured in the eternal dialectics of philosophy. However, it seems to me that their models may not exhaust the field of possibility. If a word is an event, the question for me is what precedes the event and what follows it. Because i don’t think justice or revenge name something that exists, any more than a supernova or a hand-clap names something that exists. They are merely events. Calling a killing justice may merely signal to me your disposition towards your own behaviors. Perhaps it also serves to calm the aggression of conspecifics and decrease the escalation of violence. Great. But a person is also still dead regardless of the speech act that follows (“justice” vs. “revenge” or “murder”). So i would say that neither do words change what we’ve done (they have no ontological power to change other occurring events) nor are they merely semantic reshufflings of the deck (they do have ontological power in that they are themselves occurring events, not merely epiphenomena). I think this is why Wittgenstein encouraged us to throw away our ladders once we’ve climbed them. He was pointing already towards the theory of language games and forms of life. The language games of the west have bequeathed us such dialectics. But that does not mean we cannot invent new “ones….”
Leave a Reply