Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
Interpretation
Language is fundamental to thought and can lead to misunderstandings in reasoning.
In this quote, Johann Georg Hamann highlights the essential role of language in the process of thinking. He suggests that not only does our ability to think hinge upon the language we use, but also that misunderstandings arise from how we interpret reason through language. This underscores the complexity of communication and the nuances of language, which can shape our understanding of ideas and truths.
In practice
During a lecture on philosophy, to emphasize the importance of language in shaping our thoughts.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
I have been brought up open-minded. If I didn't know any people from other countries, I'd think everyone was evil based on news stories. But I know a lot of people, and know that there is no such thing as stark good and evil. Isn't it possible there is the same amount of evil everywhere?
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
Politicians are forever coming up with 'solutions' to virtually every imaginable imperfection in life. But, if we give them more power and more of our money, we are very unlikely to end up better off on net balance.
I feel George Wallace symbolizes something in the past which America has rejected.
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
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