The Language Disenchantment In Evolving From Dialectics To Modern Logic

What is the nature of dialectics? First,based on Immanuel Kant's philosophy of transcendental realism,this paper argues that dialectics implies an ideal of constructing knowledge by pure reason.Next,grounded in Marx Weber's theory of language disenchantment,this paper also holds that dialectics confuses our emotional attachment to pure reason with language's cognitive information.Finally,standing from Wittgenstein's picturing theory of meaning,this paper further contends that,after philosophy's turn to linguistics,dialectics is one of the thinking ways of traditional philosophies,and it is necessary to clarify its role and some limits of it.This paper concludes,drawing on the three viewpoints,that the so-called knowledge obtained through dialectics is pseudo knowledge that is produced through the working of pure reason,where emotional meanings of language are mixed with its cognitive meanings and beliefs are thus regarded as knowledge.Firstly(Chapter 2),this paper traces this so-called ‘dialectical' thinking way to ancient thoughts from the former originated.The paper focuses on the dialectical thoughts of ancient Greek thinkers: What is the ancient Greek thinkers' viewpoints on dialectics? How did they start using this concept in different ways? How did Plato and Aristotle – Socratic successors – develop his ideas about dialectics in different ways? In addition to ancient Greece,sources of other dialectical thoughts should be examined when other major ancient cultures are taken into consideration.This paper will take the dialectical thought of Lao Tsu and that of Mahayana Buddhism as two examples.This part will summarize: From the perspective of modern thinkers(e.g.Kant,Wittgenstein and Weber),it laid the foundation to analyze the success or failure of dialectics that the ancient dialectical thoughts' reasonability to the ancient people and their fault in the face of Kant's critics.This paper,then(Chapter 3),presents Immanuel Kant's viewpoint on dialectics.Kant points out that the problem of dialectics lies with the fact that cognitive subjects intend to use cognition(German: verstand)to capture things that cannot be grasped by cognition and thus mistakenly take what they consider as knowledge,which,in fact,turns out to be the transcendental working of pure reason.What is acquired through pure reason is just human-beings' attitude to nature(the objective world),rather than the existing way of the nature itself that can be captured by cognition.This means that there must be a specific criterion by which to identify ‘what is knowledge.' Such criterion is nothing else but categories and their deductions.The categories' deductions aim to illustrate why the categories are entitled to apply themselves into objects of experience.In other words,Kant tries to clarify what knowledge is and how it could be acquired.Kant believes that,once the conditions on which knowledge is generated are well understood,people will immediately come to realize that avoiding dialectic thinking is an inevitable way to knowledge.The third part of this paper(Chapter 4)analyzes the historical background of Friedrich Hegel's dialectics from the perspectives of Kant and Weber.Weber points out that a sentence,when uttered,can express not only a certain content of an object's cognitive meaning,but also an emotion added to this sentence.A cognitive meaning of a sentence is intended to describe how the world exists,and an emotional meaning of it is intended to describe what our attitudes towards the world are.A characteristic of premodern thinking ways' is to mix language's cognitive meanings with its emotional meanings.For example,many ancient people believed that incantations have magical ability to change the world.On the contrary,as one of the functions of the Enlightenment and the Modern Scientific Revolution,most modern thinkers hold it as a consensus that cognitive meanings of language differ greatly from its emotional meanings.Dialectics is a way of discussing problems which adopt ordinary natural languages that are spontaneously mixed with human emotional factors.However,when we discuss scientific questions,we want to use a language that dispel emotional meanings to help understand substantial questions.In such case,when we choose to think and live in a modern way,we inevitably lose the esthetic value and charm of language in pre-modern thinking ways.Such process of language's gradual losing charm and being considered as a tool to describe the world is the process of ‘language disenchantment.'Finally(Chapter 5),based on modern philosophy's turn to linguistic analysis,this paper tries to analyze the linguistic reason of dialectics.Wittgenstein points out that symbols are meaningless once they cannot express any propositions or any thoughts.Things with ethical and religious meanings can only be presented to specific persons in specific situations,so beliefs do not have specific meanings.If Hegel's discourses about the world are merely desires and beliefs,these discourses are not the statements about the objective world itself,but rather,the presence of human-beings' attitudes to the world,as Kant points out.Then,we will hold a misconception that we can empower beliefs with all the characteristics of knowledge be describing beliefs with languages,given that knowledge describes itself with language,and that faith describes itself in the same way.As such,beliefs are wrongly regarded as knowledge.Evolving from dialectics to modern logic,language – the tool that we now use to describe the underlying structure of our own thoughts – has gradually abandoned its original poetic and has developed into formal language deprived of emotional meanings.What left for language is only our intellectual understanding of the world.From this point of view,the development of logic is not only the process of language disenchantment,but also an important part of human culture's modernization.Standing from the viewpoint of ‘language disenchantment',this paper tries to state an opinion that evolving from dialectics to modern logic is an important aspect of human culture's modernization.Finally,if Dialectics is regarded as human-beings' skepticism in understanding the world,dialectics should not have value in cognition but in practice.By removing the unrealistic expectations that people give to dialectics,we can see the value of dialectics in the really important place.Thus,a doctrine becomes very useful once being clarified.