logic and language

I don't want to talk much about language... I think the questions you brought up will be discussed at length over the summer when I'm talking about Locke, Condillac and co. Still, I feel like I can't not give a cursory response. When I spoke of Language as an imperfect vehicle for thought, I actually thought I was saying something that couldn't possibly cause any objection... I'm sure you think, as I do, that language enriches thought, gives us the ability to think more things and more complicated things. I'm sure you and I can agree that in articulating a thought we often change that thought for the better, making it clearer and more refined. I do not mean to suggest that there is or should be a better vehicle for thought, and I don't regret the absence of some ideal thought vessel. I suspect that you and me both have an unusually strong faith in what language can be made to express and joy in making it express things. What i meant is simply that language cannot communicate thought directly - the fact that you can have trouble putting a thought into words, the fact that there is no adequate vocabulary to express certain sensations or experiences, even the fact that things thought simultaneously and interconnected cannot be expressed simultaneously, all of this is what makes it possible for romantic thinkers like Rousseau to long for a pre-lapsarian language, a language before babel which would be perfectly transparent and instantly communicate thought as thought. The point is more or less what was written about the dictionary of received ideas - thoughts have to be made to conform to given vocabulary and syntactic structures, and this alters them (sometimes for the better). This gives pathways, patterns of thinking that can be a limitation or a barrier as well as an indispensable aid. Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as (though, obviously, since communication is possible, they don't always end up recognizable, and the most ordinary, everyday thoughts are often perfectly communicable). 'Imperfect' can actually be a desirable trait, since what is 'perfect' is often what is complete, finished, closed. I always refer back to the Cartesian distinction between animal and man (not that I buy the animal end of it), where man is defined by his instinct being 'imperfect', in other words not dictating how man should act or react in given situations, thus necessitating evolving behavior. It is because man is 'imperfect' that he is capable of invention. In this sort of scheme, 'imperfection' is equivalent to having free will, and being 'perfect' means being determined once and for all... of course, part of the 'imperfection', which is opacity, derives from the ambiguity that even the most lucid stylist can't help but creating at points. By lucid stylist, I mean the ideal philosopher who wants language to be transparent. I suppose 'imperfection' is also 'literary' - the fact that the qualities of language that a literary writer delights in (the materiality of language, its capacity to mean multiple things at one and the same time) are present, if often unacknowledged, even when the philosopher writes. This is a fact that the continental philosophers embrace, and sometimes sort of obsess over.
As to language being illogical, I feel somewhat less able to back up that claim. I was partly talking about the arbitrary nature of signs and the fact that convention trumps logic in all languages... in the seventeenth century, the grammar of port-royal attempted to show that language was modeled on logic, and that we speak and think using the same structures. Chomsky thought of this grammar as being a forerunner of his own generative grammar. The argument largely breaks down - I'll give some reasons in another post. Esperanto as a language without history may be created to be perfectly rational, and may have no exceptions to its rules, but it will still be required to make arbitrary choices about what its rules are, what words will have to have multiple meanings or functions (no language can have such a broad vocabulary that it can avoid this), what meanings and functions will be grouped together, etc... Everything I say from this point on relating to this is said with huge reservations (and I can't exactly remember what Lecercle said or how he said it - I'm sure I was careless in expressing it in the original post you were questioning). Remember I gave Bergson's definition of humor as the mechanical grafted onto the living? Well, language has to adapt to a living world, and if it is treated as a rigid, inflexible structure that is not capable of adapting to a situation, absurdity will result. I understand that it isn't illogical to adapt to circumstances, but logic, like language, can be treated as an abstract set of formulas - real logic can be replaced by textbook logic, just as real language can be replaced by textbook language... Ionesco's play 'the bald soprano' is a good send up of books for foreigners learning English. So I suppose that in part the word 'illogical' would here not genuinely mean 'illogical' but rather 'irreducible to a set of formulae and necessarily relying on certain arbitrary decisions determined by convention'. The nonsense relying on the 'illogical' nature of language would be 1) delighting in the frustration of rigid formulas 2) pretending arbitrary decisions were not arbitrary and providing spurious justifications for them 3) playing with groupings in the form of homonyms and homophones and words with multiple functions. I could expand on this, but why would I bother? This isn't really my topic. It's just part of what I think was in the Lecrcle book (though god knows in trying to explain what I wrote when talking about Lecercle, I've almost certainly strayed very far from what he actually wrote.
What else? I haven't read Wittgenstein, and I won't have a chance to any time this year, though I hope to read a bit of him next year. Your interest in him makes him appealing, and he pops up very frequently in books and conferences. Raluca has been reading some stuff on Wittgenstein, because she is working on a poet who was influenced by him. I can't imagine how happy it would make me to get to teach a class on Dostoyevsky, but that will never happen. I'm going to try to get a class on 'savages' for next year, but that isn't likely, and even that isn't what I would most want to teach. There's no possibility for teaching the stuff I'd most like to. As far as what you were saying about what Wittgenstein does, all I can say is that it sounds appealing. Though, to return to the very beginning of this post... I don't know quite how to put this, and it has nothing to do with Wittgenstein and more to do with the idea of seeing things through a different lense, casting a different light on the world or whatever... and what you said about 'clearly this has to be nuanced, because if that were what he was trying to say why wouldn't he have just said it exactly like I just did' (or words to that effect). I actually get incredibly frustrated with things I can't put into words, and tend to love anything that gives straightforward lucid explanations that ring true. I love things that add to my own ability to put things into words. On the other hand, I do think art can be used to help explain and understand he world just like philosophy can, and I have trouble separating the two. Music is probably the most direct and sensual of the arts, the one I have the least intellectual reaction to and enjoy the most for its own sake - but even music is something I enjoy talking about and trying to explain, and when I try explaining it, I'm always talking about something more general than just music.