Lectures / 18/02/2009 7:30 pm

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

Is language capable of expressing the complexity of the world? Nietzsche voiced his doubts and made fun of attempts to use our limited intellectual capacity and our limited language to grasp something like “absolute truths”. Ludwig Wittgenstein warned "against the bewitching of our minds through the means of our language".
Are we really locked up in the prison of our language? Rather than being a defining characteristic of the special rank occupied by man, is language perhaps a treacherous medium, a Greek gift? Are there any alternatives to language? For instance, can art tide us over the boundaries that language brings us up against so quickly? And is the task set aside for philosophy perhaps some sort of “language therapy”? In which case, had we not better be silent, on the far side of language?