The main question I have in re: all the post Hegelian philosophers who re-created a symbolic world order (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan) is whether they didn’t just transfer the locus of the noumenal internally? Is the noumenal now to be had in an expert’s true interpretation of a symbolic manifold, present solely to the unconscious and elaborated only by the incantations of a new priest-hood? Are we determined by speech or is speech another event similar to the fall of a meteor or the split of an atom? Present and to some extent predictable, yet not determined?
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metonymy4u 
Hello. I’ve understand your questions to handle the following concerns/dilemmas regarding the philosophies or the aforementioned:
First, I’ve identified an epistemological concern about the relationship between language and consciousness. Is knowledge of that structure beyond our reach empirically, i.e. and does it not appear to/for consciousness and is thus noumenal and not phenomenal?
Have those aforementioned philosophies merely established an oligarchy of types that serves to interpret the manifold of language and its relations to consciousness, subconscious and the like?
Despite a lack of ‘knowing how’, a ‘knowing that’ is still possible – this acts as a premise. Thus knowing that language and consciousness are intertwined, what does that mean for human freedom?
Looking forward to your feedback.
Hi John – thanks so much for your question, it made my day! 🙂
I’m worried that I might not understand it very well, so please forgive me if my answer goes astray…
I agree that I am interested in the topics of language and mind (consciousness, if you wish…).
I’m not so sure I buy into the contemporary models of the structuralists and the post structuralists. That is, I’m not sure I agree that language imposes, a priori, a structure upon our experience, and that we therefore are most well served by a deconstruction of that determining structure. That’s my epistemological concern. My ontological concern, which is related, is that I’m not sure that the world contains information. The following quote from Catherine Belsey indicates the position that I’m trying to come along side of and say, “well, from one perspective yes, but from another perspective no, and can we use some more provisional language here about communication and what is communicated?”:
“Language makes dialogue possible, but only on condition we use it appropriately, subscribing to the meanings already given in the language that always precedes our familiarity with it….Language, understood in the broad sense of the term to include all signifying systems, including images and symbols, gives us access to information.”
Does that mean that I’m claiming a noumenal status for the structures of language? Am I saying that semiotic structures are noumenal objects that can be hypothesized, and perhaps even deduced transcendentally? I don’t think I am. For the simple reason that I consider myself more of a pragmatist than structuralist. So I’m not at all convinced that language determines us in any a priori fashion. Though i heartily agree that language can influence us very strongly. But I also see language as a feature of the contextual system, not an a priori cause of the system. Just think about linguistic shifts: As we learned to speak less in Scholastic metaphors and more in Enlightenment metaphors, were the authors participating in that change creating a new language or simply reflecting a cultural shift in habits and needs? The answer I think is yes. I see language as a behavior. Language therefore causes changes and responds to changes. The system seems very dynamic to me and to try and track down an a priori cause of any given effect is not always useful. Except, of course, when it is… 🙂
So I think you might already know what I’d say about any manifold of language…that to speak of a manifold is to participate in a set of metaphors (cultural habits and customs) that, although they were fantastically useful in their time (late 18th century western Europe), I’m thinking we can begin to move beyond. We can attack rationalism as an oligarchy of habits interpreting a manifold in a way that served their political aims. Or we can discard the entire metaphor of the manifold and the synthesis. And see what happens.
Part of the culture of manifold metaphors (it seems to me) is the conviction that we can “know that X.” That is, the representational theory of knowledge. And this approach is still useful at times. Searle employs it very productively I think, to get readers interested in what he calls social ontology and the theories of artificial intelligence. Representational theories do indeed seem to have stimulated a great deal of critical thinking. I just not sure that that is the end of the story. I think we can get more creative than that, and that we need to get more creative if we are going to figure out how to not blow ourselves to bits. But yes, I will grant that if one wishes to adopt the representational theory of language as a premise, this may still be a useful heuristic. Though I also think Wittgenstein blew it out of the water as the “be all” of philosophical investigation.
To address your final comment, of course given all the previous statements, I’m not willing to admit that language and consciousness are intertwined, if by that one means that one implies the other, or depends on the other in some essential way. I agree we do tend to live in our language a great deal of the time. But I think this is detrimental to us and the rest of the planet, and I think it is possible, in fact necessary to our survival, for us to learn to live a different way. So I resist the implication that language being intertwined with consciousness is a blow to freedom.
Of course freedom itself is an interesting topic. I think I posted something on that a while back. I agree with what I take to be Kant’s solution to the problem: that we cannot speak about our experiences for very long without referring to the notion of freedom, but at the same time we can never know if we are in fact as free as we think we are.
I wrote a piece for colleagues in psychology recently called “The critique of free reason,” which is meant to be an answer to the concern that behavioral psychology “takes away human freedom” and “treats us all like robots.” Perhaps I’ll post it here. it’s much longer than my usual post. but then, so has this answer been! 🙂
i love discovering people like you who are still interested in these questions. thank you.
another way to look at it, that ties back to my original post, is to say that i’m actually denying (like Ryle i think…) that there is an a priori useful distinction to be made between knowing how and knowing that. what neo-hegelian thinkers have in common, i believe, is the “knowing that” that can be applied to the internal structures of a culture, of reason, the psyche or language (depending on the author). to be sure, Kant probably left himself open to this interpretation when he (apparently) proposed a new tribunal of reason that could discover, if not the grounds of reality, at least the grounds of its own functioning. however, i believe this represents a misreading of Kant’s intent. I believe he understood his own method to be a much more radical attack on any sort of absolute knowledge, even of ourselves. why else would he critique rational psychology and present the antinomy of freedom? these, to me, speak to his understanding of even “the self” (and all of its predicates) as a noumenal object. and so I object to those authors that i experience as neo-hegelian, as i tried to express poetically in the original posting…though Rorty has helped me appreciate what is inspiring and wonderful about hegelian utopianism…