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The Fall of Language - Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning (Hardcover)
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The Fall of Language - Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning (Hardcover)
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In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin's
philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of
meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known
largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature,
Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This
early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical
by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights
and anticipates-in some respects surpasses-the later thought of a
central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that
"language as such" is not a means for communicating an
extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of
expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg
Hamann's understanding of God's creation as communication to
humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and
that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world
but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the
transformations that language as such undergoes while making its
way into human language as the "fall of language." This is a fall
from "names"-language that responds mimetically to reality-to signs
that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin's approach
initially seems alien to Wittgenstein's, both reject a designative
understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell's
paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls "the
bewitchment of our understanding by means of language." Putting
Wittgenstein's work in dialogue with Benjamin's sheds light on its
historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein's thought.
Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their
comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and
what it does.
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