Natural language

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani finds the expression "natural language" paradoxical and treats it as a linguists' antiphrasis: nothing is less natural than language. It is acquired, based on double articulation and distinct from animal communication. He therefore prefers to speak of ordinary language, or of "ordinary ideological language"12. It is everyday language, equivocal and full of metaphors. Saying "the day is breaking" is making poetry without knowing it, not astronomy3. This language does not serve first of all to know: it serves to act, to seduce, to threaten or to judge, and it expresses a logic of the subject, not that of objects4. He sets it against mathematics: the mathematician abandons it for univocal signs and algorithms, the poet transforms it, the philosopher cannot leave it5. The subjective, which is philosophy's object, is indeed found in this language. Philosophy must therefore seek within it a rigour comparable to that of mathematics6.

1. 1D. Pagani / Réponse de M. Clouscard à C. Morilhat • Seconde Partie10 Sept 2019 · 1:16:56
2. 2Clouscard et le problème de Socrate14 Oct 2022 · 2:52
3. 3Musicosophie 7. Les Grecs, le mythe et la musique17 Dec 2020 · 29:24
4. 4#14 Cavernes d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui - De Platon à la modernité10 Jun 2022 · 37:19
5. 59 #20 Du SIGNAL au SIGNE • Einstein28 Apr 2021 · 58:07
6. 6#15 Nietzsche : Pertinence philosophique ou musicale ? Réponses aux questions23 Jun 2022 · 7:25

Summary produced automatically from 28 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.