“If I wish to climb upward in the language critique, which is the most important business of thinking human beings, then I must destroy language behind me and in front of me and within me at every step; I must shatter each rung of the ladder as I step on it. Whoever wishes to follow must reconstruct the ladder rungs in order to shatter them yet again.”
Mauthner.Here, linguistic nihilism is (firstly) expected to entail ontological nihilism. Nonetheless, the subject is linguistic nihilism.Correspondence is firstly derived from the desire and fetish of the words, rather than from a (real) predicated correspondence. Word-world relation is thus indicted as a practical delusion. The fetishized noun, then, appeals to the language-actor and the language-actor will extrapolate from there, assuming that their words should or must correspond to some reality, and that the ontological commitments they feel they make also substantially designate ontological objects; real objects.The “real objects” or “real world” is already dubious. The anti-realist and realist, though, do share a common faith in language. Further, they share a common faith in the ability to make relevant, substantial claims about ontology one way or the other. Whether through denial or affirmation. That is, they hope to salvage ontology and ontological commitments, whether that be with language or exclusively through or into language. They hope to salvage philosophical aims. This ontology - left or right - which they hope to salvage or express, is dubious in its flesh. As Westerhoff notes, “ontologies would either incorporate an infinite downward descent of ontological dependence, or they would close up on themselves, forming a cycle of dependence.”Either way, the indictment of (being) hypnotized is relatively the same. The hypnosis is the conflation of words with ontological realness and representations or expressions of truth-values, or ontological salvation through social construction. The medium is quite irrelevant, as has been expressed, since the hypnosis therein relies on very similar and problematic precepts.The hypnosis of language is deliriant in its potency; the “thinker” here imagines that their thinking and conceptual arena is something separate from the act of speaking. Mauthner’s indictment is quite correct on this matter (so it would seem to me) that there is no such real thing. More specifically, there is no such thing as thinking without speaking, these are equivalent “things.” The thinker who expects that his thinking and conceptual performance should, at best, be expressed through speaking but rigorously developed through his “thinking” is then mistaken. It is erroneous to imagine a separation where there is none.Speaking is much more easily understood through the framing of hypnosis; vocalizations or words “tossed” back and forth (including typing; internet speech), emptily differentiated, the fetishized differentiation going through a sort of reincarnation through the submission of the language-actor being uttered at, then uttering back at. Speech, per language games, is of course compelling. It being compelling could be understood as the glue that holds the games together semi-permanently and protects it from hyper-analytic collapse.With this hypnosis of language, there is then the secondary problem which follows from this indictment. Language-actors, in their “language-games”, share a commonplace commitment to an unanalyzed play in their hypnosis. This is, as such, inescapable. Analyzing the practical going-ons of day-to-day life would inherently result in a collapse of the unspoken hypnotic factors that keep these things together and protect them from an overly logical collapse of culture and conversation. In this field or game which relies on a natural lack of hyper-analysis or meta-speculation thereof, the land is fertile. Ripe is the word-fetishism and word-superstition that grants a way for the conflation of semantics and nouns with the real designation of objects and worldly things. Just as ripe is the sort of deification of language itself to salvage ontological commitment and the reaffirmation of metaphysics or commonplace philosophy through the conduit of reification per language.Well, this would be expected. The ontological emptiness of language for the language-actors is best ignored, since the intuitive, conceptual expectation of fullness is important for the maintenance of language games insofar as the constant recognition of emptiness would dispel the cohesion in the hypnosis of these games. This creates a sort of circular movement, where the rules of the games are deified and fetishized, reaffirmed and successively reincarnated by the submission of the many actors. As many people submit to language games, cogency is further created within the game of language and the conflation thereof with potential ontological prospects.Such is the direction of humans, commonly and improperly conflated with artificial substantive worlds intuitively derived from the actor’s grammar.