Review article

Beyond the Sensibility of Language

Ćiril Čoh ; First Gymnasium, Varaždin, Croatia

Abstract

“Whatever exists, exists otherwise in something else than it exist in itself” (Nicolaus Cusanus). The world of man is a mediated indirect world and it can exist completely separate from what the world in itself is, the latter being referred to today as immediacy, Life, authentic existence. Rationality, symbolic thought, and language connect us to the reality, but when they are left to themselves they reduce otherwise infinite variety within the reality and substitute the richness of life with hyperreality ad extensions (Baudrillard, McLuhan).
We are lost in the world of symbols, according to Cusanus, because we lack the sensibility to differentiate the symbol from the signified symbolized. Kant extends this to the opposition between the worldforus and the worldperse, thereby pointing out that our experience of the world is determined by the spectacles through which we see it. Cusanus on the other hand offers the spectacles that enable us to achieve the before mentioned sensibility, comparing them to the semiprecious stone beryl, which enables otherwise invisible objects to become visible if observed through the stone. The concerned medium is thus more sensible than language. Plato made the cognition of this medium a prerequisite for entry into his Academy.

Keywords

world; medium; scientific realism; imagination; symbolization; naïve empiricism; narcissist symbolism; “intellectual glasses”; tetraktys

Hrčak ID:

68562

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/68562

Publication date:

17.5.2011.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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