The categories of identity, substance, Being, personal identity all begin to lose their ontological character under the sociological microscope. I am even beginning to doubt whether communication (like what I am trying to do now) is even possible in the sense of communicating internal dialogues or thought processes from one person to another. How is it that my words come to mean something? How is it that we come to say what we mean?
Beginning with Wittgenstein, he attacks the very idea that words have stable referrents: "chair" does not necessarily have its referrent in the physical assemblage that we call chair, its meaning as such is a temporary signification given to it within a certain closed system of meanings or what he calls a language game. Derrida further fucks with language by pointing out that even the sounds we pronounce when we say "chair" are themselves only incidentally connected with the sign "chair". I mean....this is radical stuff! So much philosophy is predicated on the assumption of a stable field of meanings and significations that can be clarified, manipulated and studied so as to extract an essential, present meaning from philosophical discourse.
All the above means that we are at best groping around within a mush of signifiers and signifieds and arbitrarily assigning stable values or meanings to words and concepts that are in constant flux..what does that say for personal identity? What does that mean (and there's that word again) for statements that begin " I think..." or "I say..."?
Argh!
posted by WM @ 12:24
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