This is from a book I just bought by Umberto Eco. I have been interested in the relation between language and the way in which we think. Especially the way in which we define and categorize our sense experience. A book on "Language and Cognition" seemed like the ticket. I had heard of Umberto Eco, though I didn't know much about him other than from a recommendation of a friend of mine who was reading his novel, The Name of the Rose. So far I am very impressed and intrigued. Though, having to know like five languages just to keep up with him is a little daunting (google is your savior!). -
"[Being] may well be the horizon of every other evidence, but it becomes a philosophical problem only when we begin to talk about it, and it is precisely our talking about it that makes it ambiguous and polyvocal. The fact that this ambiguity can be reduced does not alter the fact that we become aware of it only through speech. As it is thinkable, being manifests itself to us right from the outset as an effect of language.
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"The moment it appears before us, being arouses interpretation; the moment we can speak of it, it is already interpreted. There is no help for it. Not even Parmenides escaped this circle, despite his having labeled the onomata unreliable. But the onomata were fallacious names that we are led, prior to philosophical reflection, to give to that which becomes. But Parmenides was the first to express in words the invitation to recognize (and interpret) the many signs (semata) through which being arouses our discourse. And for being to exist, it is necessary to say as well as to think (DK 6)...
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..."It might be objected that we say without contradiction that which appertains to the substance, a substance independent of our speaking about it. But up to what point? How do we talk about the substance? How can we say without contradiction that man is a rational animal, whereas saying that he is white or that he runs indicates only a transient accident and cannot therefore be the object of science? In the act of perception the active intellect abstracts the essense from the synolon ([composite of] matter + form), and therefore it seems that in the cognitive moment we immediately and effortlessly grasp the to ti en einai [the essence] (1028b 33.36), what being was and therefore stably is. But what can we say of the essence? All we can do is give its definition: "And defintion results from the necessity of its meaning something. Definition is the notion (logos) whose name (onoma) is the sign (semeion)" (1012a 22-24).
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"Alas! We have irrepressible proof of the existence of the individuals, but we can say nothing about them, except by naming them through their essesnce, that is to say by genus and differentia (not therefore "this man" but "man"). The moment we enter the universe of essenses, we enter the universe of definitions, that is to say the universe of language that defines.
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"We have few names and few definitions for an infinity of single things. Therefore recourse to the universal is not strength of thought but weakness of discourse. The problem is that man always talks in general while things are singular. Language names by blurring the irrepressible proof of the existing individual. And all attempted remedies will be vain: the reflexio ad phantasmata, reducing the concept to flatus vocis with respect to the individual as the sole intuitive datum, entrenching oneself behind the indexicals, proper names, and rigid designators...all panaceas. With the exception of a few cases (in which we might not even speak, but point a finger, whistle, seize an arm--but in those cases we are simply being and not alking about being), we are invariably already situated in the unviersal when we talk."
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-Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999), 22-23.
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