The positive outcome of philosophyDietzgen, Joseph
Philosophy
The positive outcome of philosophy
Dietzgen, Joseph
Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Philosophy
Just as the faculty of thinking is innate in the child, and grows with
its development, so mankind's faculty of thought grows and has hitherto
expressed itself in a language which gave only instinctive conceptions
of the composition of the human brain and of its functions. The
construction of languages explains in a way the condition of the human
mind which had only inadequate knowledge of itself so far. Those
shortcomings of speech which I called slips of the tongue were not
understood until sufficient progress had been made in the explanation of
the process of thinking, and now these same shortcomings offer an
excellent means of representing and demonstrating the results of
enlightenment.
The mind is to give to man a picture of the world, the language is the
brush of the mind. It paints by its construction the universal
relationship of all things referred to in the beginning of this chapter,
and it does so in the following manner: It gives to each thing not only
its own name, but also adds to it another indicating its family, and
another indicating its race, another for the species, the genus, and
finally a general name which proclaims that all things are parts of the
one indivisible unit which is called world, existence, universe, cosmos.
This diagrammatic construction of language furnishes us with an
illustration of the graduated relationship of things and of the way in
which the human race arrives at its knowledge, its perceptions or
pictures.
We said that philosophy is that endeavor which seeks to throw light on
the process of human thought. This work has been rendered very difficult
by the unavoidable misunderstanding of the universal relationship just
mentioned. The transcendentalists insist above all that the process of
thinking and its product, thought, should not be classed among ordinary
physics, not as a part of physical nature, but as the creature of
another nature which carries the mysterious name of metaphysics. That
such a nature and such a science is neither possible nor real is proven
by the construction of language which normally describes everything as
being closely related and corroborates this by its abnormal shortcomings
which we called slips of the tongue.
The shortcomings of language which demonstrate the positive outcome of
philosophy consist in occasionally giving insufficiently significant
names to things belonging to a group in which the distinction between
individuals, species, genera, and families is not clearly defined. It is
not discernible, for instance, whether the term "cat" applies to a
domestic cat or to a tiger, because that term is used for a large class
of animals of which the domestic cat is the arch-type.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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