On Oct 1, 4:07?pm, zinnic
gate.net> wrote:> On Sep 28, 1:54 pm, John Jones
aol.com> wrote:
>>> Here is an explanation of why I think that ideas are not expressed
>> through or by language. My original post was exploratory, but
>> certainly not idly made. I will reply to other posts, but I have given
>> a new post because there seems a lot of replies that I had not
>> expected:
>
>> We do not express ideas through language...I will give an analogy: I
>> do not see colours through sight, I simply see colours, and sight is
>> defined through that. Yet we would not say that sight is colours. And
>> we could not say that sight is seeing colours, or even that it is the
>> organ of sight.
>
> I agree that "seeing' does not see. But I believe sight is seeing and
> seeing is sight. Blindness is not seeing and not seeing is blindness.
> (Does that make me blind?)
Yes, no probs.
>> In other words, I do not display my ideas through language, I simply
>> display my ideas.
>
> I cannot say I display ideas through language
>
>> because this would mean that language is an object I use to express
>> myself. But language is not the means of making it, and neither is it
>> the expression of any one idea or the accumulation of all
>> 'expressable' ideas.
>
> What difference in meaning do you assign to "display" as opposed to
> "express" in this context?
No great significance. Birds have song-display, display uses presence
whereas expression may have its author absent. Derrida had something
to say about that, but I can't remember what.
>>Language is a FRAMEWORK, and not an object in a
>> framework. A framework is not surveyable -- so I cannot say 'I express
>> my ideas through language', because this simultaneously treats
>> language as an unsurveyable framework, and an object in its own
>> framework.
>
> As implied by someone else. If Art is the practice of painting or
> music etc, why is language (literature) not the expression of ideas?
I'm ok with that.
> I am unable to get beyond - language is to 'expression of ideas' as
> sensation is to 'response to stimli'. That is, sensation itself does
> not react to stimuli. The senses do! Am I there yet? ;-)
If sensation is response to stimuli, I would not compare it to
language, because language is not a response but a shared gestalt.
