You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I hope you do not expect me to give a comprehensive picture of our time in these lectures. You will even be disappointed if you expect me to tell you something new. What I have to say is obvious and everybody can see it, in a way that is perhaps better than I can, certainly different. Yet it is well worth looking occasionally at what is familiar through the eyes of a stranger, and if nothing else is achieved but a lively conflict of opinions, that is quite enough for me.
With this I have come to the theme of today. One has to speak in order to exchange opinions and I want to talk to you a little about speaking.
Daily and hourly we use an instrument, I mean language, and we take it so much for granted that we hardly ever think about it and what kind of a tool it is, just as we use a handkerchief without asking how old this custom is and where it comes from. This is the fate of everyday things.
That much is clear: language is the vehicle of culture. It is the precondition of human communication. Language has created religion and art, built streets and conducted trade all over the world. In truth it is the means by which thought turns to action and, eternally fertile, it produces new thoughts. Agriculture is as unthinkable without language as is philosophy; the comforts of the house and even the house itself were made by it; all action, thought, emotion, even love and hatred, God and nature are dependent on language. All this is obvious. Yet I beg you to look around once more and with eye and mind find all the concepts which make up language. I would like you to devote at least a short while to the contemplation of this miracle. The bolder your imagination, the quicker its survey of this world, the better for our mutual understanding.