175 / 298
Vico’s Ring
175
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language: «The […] point is that a language […]
is a whole world and encircles a whole culture; it involves a way of evaluating
things and of coping with reality. In the
Tractatus
Wittgenstein had suggested
that […] “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” […]. A sys-
tem of symbols is a world, so a language, as a system of symbols, embraces a
world, and children, when they learn to use a language, learn also to think of
the world. The language I learn, clasps my life and gives my world structures
and determinations, because a use of language is a culture […]» (E. Riverso,
Vico and Wittgenstein
, cit., pp. 267-268). Riverso suggests that «such points in
the later philosophy of Wittgenstein are comparable to some points of the
philosophy of Giambattista Vico […]» (
ibid.
, p. 268). Riverso does not explic-
itly characterize Wittgenstein’s philosophy as implying “language as universal
medium”; this identification, however, has been argued by Hintikka through a
close reading of the Wittgenstein
corpus
(see Id.,
Lingua universalis
, cit., pp. 162-
190; material reprinted from M. B. Hintikka - J. Hintikka,
Investigating Wittgen-
stein
, Oxford-New York, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 1-29), summed up in stat-
ing that «language was for Wittgenstein almost literally a prison from which
one cannot hope to escape, not merely a “false prison” like a fly-bottle» (
ibid.
,
p. XI). According to Hintikka, Wittgenstein “obeys his own principles” crys-
tallized in the “universality/totality of language” when he rejects
meta
-
theoretical statements of all kinds, including philosophical metastatements, as
when he said: «As there is no metaphysics, there is no metalogic, either»;
«[o]ne might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy”
there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so […]» (quoted
ibid.
,
p. 184; the first statement from
Manuscript 110
, the second from L. Wittgen-
stein,
Philosophical Investigations
, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil
Blackwell, 1953, Part I, section 121, p. 49
ᵉ
). Hintikka’s conclusion is: «[…]
Wittgenstein has a theoretical reason for trying to rule out not only all philo-
sophical but also all other metatheoretical contexts. This reason is the univer-
sality of language, which implies that the apparently metatheoretical uses of
language are not the genuine ones» (
ibid.
, p. 185).
335
To cite just one example or current, the philosophy of Peter Ramus
(1515-1572), Ramism, and Port-Royal logic, of which it has been said: «In this
economy [consisting of a mechanized, diagrammatic method] where every-
thing having to do with speech tends to be in one way or another metamor-
phosed in terms of structure and vision, the rhetorical approach to life […] is
sealed off into a cul-de-sac. The attitude toward speech has changed. Speech
is no longer a medium in which the human mind and sensibility lives. It is re-
sented, rather, as an accretion to thought, hereupon imagined as ranging
noiseless concepts or “ideas” in a silent field of mental space. Here the perfect