Language is the most precious and the most dangerous human gift Essay

Language is the most precious and the most dangerous human gift Friedrich Hlderlin - Essay Example Language is one of the most precious human gifts as it allows human beings to exchange thoughts and share information. Language is founded in the human need to make sense of the world and our place in it. What distinguishes it from mere personal opinion and credulity is its rejection of passionate convictions as sufficient grounds for belief and action, and its commitment to careful analysis and systematic reasoning. Name of essay Language is the most precious and the most dangerous human gift perfectly reflect communative tool between people. Rather than a uniform body of doctrine, philosophy manifests itself in an ongoing process of critically examining and refining the grounds for our beliefs and actions, the ideas we recognize as true, as deserving our loyalty and commitment. Thesis Friedrich Hlderlin states that language is the most precious and the most dangerous human gift". Language is among the signs and symbols by which humans order their worlds and construct their conceptions of reality. Researchers explore symbolic and semiotic accounts of language as an instrument by which people conceive reality or construct their representations of it: the ways in which experience mediates interpretation of the world. Since symbolism requires a relation between two different kinds of thing, one that symbolizes or signifies and another that is symbolized or signified, the dualistic tensions between the linguistic intrinsic and extrinsic figure prominently in symbolic theories, as do questions about interpretive latitude. Suspending 'logical' belief in the opposition of subject and object, inside and outside, mind and body, phenomenologists explore language from the perspective of the lived, bodily experience-from the interpreter's point of view, one might say. By attempting to set aside the binary oppositions that fuel debates between autonomists and heteronomists , phenomenology offers a perspective that is strikingly fresh and richly resonant with language as a lived, human process (Bennett et al 43). The idea that language structure is in some sense symbolic has philosophical roots that probably extend at least as far back in history as the ancient doctrines of mimesis and ethos-the belief that language imitates and shapes attributes of human character. The influence of idealism is also quite often evident in symbolic theories, since its quest to secure a place for language in the realm of cognitively significant activity yielded so many inspiring descriptions of language's distinctive felt and rational attributes. Also, since symbolic accounts generally entail the conviction that language's significance is a function of its capacity to signify, point to, or represent something other than itself, familiar tensions between expression and autonomy (between referential capacity and presentational immediacy) often lie very near the surface. Thus, symbolic accounts of language occasionally resonate deeply with idealistic philosophical orientations of formalistic or expressionistic per suasions, orientations to which they are in certain respects related. At the heart of her theory lies a very distinctive definition of 'symbol': a vehicle for the conception of reality (Searle 82). Anthropology of language suggests that language is the main criterion that distinguishes humans from other animals. What language does, in this view, is enable conception. This act of coherence making is, furthermore, the common foundation of thought and language; this achievement of coherence, not the logical operations by which it is subsequently manipulated and ordered, is the root of humankind's distinctive mental power. In other words, thought and language are each ways albeit contrasting ways -- of 'transforming