Fido the Yak

Here are a few highlights of my day yesterday:

• made espresso,




• read the news of the world,

  
  

• played the blues,




• did my calisthenics,




• listened to Elmo Hope,




• ate some red pepper soup,




• read that "[w]ord and subject matter, language and reality, are inseperable, and the limits of our understanding coincide with the limits of our common language. In this sense, there is no 'world in itself' beyond its presence as the subject matter a particular language community. We do not first have an extralinguistic contact with the world and then put this world into the instrumentation of language. To begin by assuming such a schema is to reduce language to the status of a tool, which fails to grasp its all-encompassing, world-constituting significance" (David E. Linge, "Editors Introduction," Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. xxviii-xxix),




• made a quiche.

Not only do I disagree with Linge's premise that language and reality are coextensive, I think he's improperly come to a conclusion about alternatives to his point of view. Language is world-constituting and there are worlds outside of language. Life is more than one activity. If there is a world that belongs to life itself, a lifeworld, there is every reason to assume that it is not coextensive with language.

Labels: Elmo Hope, Gadamer, language, lifeworld, Linge, world

posted by Fido the Yak at 10:13 AM.