A Live Language: Concreteness, Openness, Ambivalence
A Live Language: Concreteness, Openness, Ambivalence

Summary/Abstract: Wittgenstein has shown that that life, in the sense that applies in the fi rst place to human beings, is inherently linguistic. In this paper, I ask what is involved in language, given that it is thus essential to life, answering that language—or concepts—must be both alive and the ground for life. This is explicated by a Wittgensteinian series of entailments of features. According to the fi rst feature, concepts are not intentional engagements. The second feature brings life back to concepts by describing them as infl ectible: Attitudes, actions, conversations and other engagements infl ect concepts, i.e., concepts take their particular characters in our actual engagements. However, infl ections themselves would be reifi ed together with the life they ground unless they could preserve the openness of concepts: hence the third feature of re-infl ectibility. Finally, the openness of language must be revealed in actual life. This entails the possibility of conceptual ambivalence.

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