A Few Words About Words

Language.

there is no philosophy without it, inasmuch as it lies at the basis of all thought; on the other hand, philosophers will be seduced by it as long as they have not inquired into its mysterious origin and appreciated the ways one can be deceived by it (Betz).

In Genesis, God lets Adam name the animals. Presumably Adam did not name them Steve, Gary, Fred, ad nauseam, but rather, lion, monkey, bird, etc. 

In other words, Adam was not a nominalist, rather, was capable of seeing universals and essences -- immateriality and transcendence -- from the get-go. Conversely, Eve is given a proper name, going to her human individuality and personhood.

But then, in the very next chapter, our furbears are sure enough seduced and deceived by language -- by the words of the serpent. And here we are.

So, language cuts both ways: without it one cannot tell the truth, but nor can one lie -- including to oneself.

In short, language can both deceive and reveal; it can turn philosophers into fools and fishermen into saints.

For Hamann, Kant is one of those philosophers-turned-fools as a result of his misuse of language. Hamann was one of the first readers of the Critique of Pure Reason, and its first critic. Or meta-critic, rather. (The chapter we're looking at and trying to wrestle to the ground is called Hamann's Metacritique of Kant: Deconstructing the Transcendental Dream.) And deconstruct it he does, only 200 years before deconstruction was a thing.

Hamann's Metacritique "has a strong claim to be the starting point of post-Kantian philosophy."

"What is crucial in Kantianism," writes Schuon, is 

the altogether “irrational” desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

For Hamann, "the problems attending Kant's Critique ultimately stem from a misunderstanding of language." Ultimately, "language is never merely language; it is also a revelation." 

In short, language, whatever else it reveals, is already a revelation: it is always meta- in relation to its own immanent activities. Nor can we be enclosed in language without violating what language is -- which is to say, open to what transcends it. 

Hamann begins with the question of "how is the ability to think possible?," which "is the primary question Kant leaves unanswered." This is because language "is prior to reason": 

Not only does the entire ability to think rest upon language... but language is also the center of the misunderstanding of reason with itself... 

Again, it cuts both ways: the bad way repeats "the logic of the Fall," because "it separates things that in no way can be separated. Things without relations, and relations without things." 

Yesterday we spoke of irreducibles, language being one of them. But so too is relation irreducible, especially the relation between word and an extramental reality that includes immaterial essences. Otherwise we're back to giving each cow a particular name instead of seeing universal cowness.

Hamann ultimately grounds language in "the hypostatic union of the Incarnate Logos," and why not? If it didn't exist, we would have to invent something like it in order to account for the marvelous properties of language, which again is a spontaneous union of concept and thing, or intellect and intelligibility. "Here one is presented with a clear alternative": 

Is language a Gnostic "prison-house" in which thought is trapped because it cannot get outside the infinite regress of signification to some definitive "transcendental signified"?

Or

a sacramental medium of divine self-communication, whose infinite regress is an image of God's own infinity and whose metaphorical richness is a foretaste of divine plenitude?

I'm going with #2, being that the infinitude of language is conformed to the infinitude of the "transcendental signified," or what we call O.

Hamann's metacritque is meant ultimately to save reason from theoretical suicide, i.e., from nihilistic auto-destruction...

And how is that working out?

either one capitulates to postmodernity, which can save neither reason, nor meaning, nor morality, nor even... the substance of the phenomena themselves; or one admits the possibility of illumination from another source..., not in the form of auto-illumination..., but as a gift that flows down from above, from "the Father of lights."

Here again, I'm going with door #2, not wall #1. And for a postmodern thinker such as Derrida it is literally a wall, for "there is nothing outside the text," which 

ultimately signifies a "closed system of signs, which only refer to other signs without ever meeting up with [a] referent." 

"Language is hereby made into a closed, immanent totality, a 'prison-house' from which there is no escape." It is 

to deny any point of contact with "substances," that we would call "real" or any "things" that would "match up with our words for them."

It comes down to illumination or nihilism: "either language inspired by the Holy Ghost in response to the Logos, or language inspired by Nothing at all." The Enlightenment pretended to invent the light by which it sees, but it was present way before we arrived on the scene.