2 posts tagged “brice parain”
The thought of Brice Parain is disconcerting first of all because it is centered upon some infinitely simple truths and because, almost immediately, even before they are told to us, it offers an account of the impossibility of stating them in a direct way: he must follow the path of error to the end where we completely lost these truths.
The first [of these simple truths] is that man does not exist without
language because language has created him; the second is that in order
to fulfill his purpose or simply to maintain his current state, he must
perform his acts in solidarity with his speech; finally, the third is
that as soon as he transgresses the speech "of his mouth" he destroys
his existence and abandons his human specificity....Parain insists that
individual consciousness is animated by its subjection to the movement
of language and is thereby made only to follow the universal movement
of consciousness." -- Pierre Klossowski, "Language, Silence, and
Communism," in Such a Deathly Desire
We bump up against the limits of our world when we discover that even conceptual content involves a space of reasons, and perhaps even a space of words -- that spontaneously arrived-at conceptual content, as John McDowell writes in Mind and World, mediates the relation between minds and the world. It may not be too much to argue -- using a familiar chord, then -- that thoughts without language are empty. At least, this is Parain's point, here, broadening the Kantian definition of what intuitions entail. -- EMG
