Consider the following image:
The figures in it represent what language says, i.e. such or such words (“bird,” “snowflake,” “tree,” “mountain”),(⊗) whereas the ground (the white space inside the square) stands for the dimension that makes meaningful what language says. By the “dimension that makes meaningful what language says” we do not mean a word’s referent: the real thing which the word “bird” denotes, for example, but the opening of reality that language inherently sets forth, which is certainly immanent in language and hence internal to it, but works at the same time, so to speak, as language’s own meta-premise.
Here is an example: this thing, which I call “bird,” which is nothing yet for me before I acknowledge it as a “thing,” and which is still nothing sufficiently determinate for me before I assign it the name “bird,” is meaningful as something different, say, from a “sunset” in that it stands out for me – from within the hypercomplex tapestry that I call “reality” presents to what I call my “perception” – in a different way than what I call the “setting” of what I call the “sun” stands out in turn. However, I would be unable to perceive what I call “bird” and what I call “sunset” not only as two different things, but also as something in each case, without the simultaneous concurrence of meaning: in the absence of the latter, I would probably only perceive two indistinct movements, one eventually accompanied by a sound, the other one by a decrease in the temperature… and this is already saying too much, for “movement,” “sound,” and “temperature” are already meaningful things on their part.
In short, there is a somewhat elusive relation between language, meaning, and perception. And yet it seems necessary to distinguish them as three dimensions, or as the three sides, of a single thing. Now, while two of such dimensions, namely, language and perception, are more or less tangible for us, and thus self-evident as such, the other one, meaning, remains like a floating intangible.
Undeniably, the first one to have noticed this is Plato. If the ideas that we make of things (“bird,” “sunset,” etc.) are also their principles of intelligibility, he suggests, there must be a principle of intelligibility for the ideas themselves, i.e. an idea of all ideas, which in the Republic he calls τὸ ἀγαθόν (to agathon), which is commonly translated as the “good” and which Socrates compares to the “sun” (see 508a–521b). In fact, τὸ ἀγαθόν means in such context the good disposition that makes all ideas possible and meaningful: our objects of knowledge (i.e. the ideas), says Socrates, owe to the good their being and their being known (509b). Furthermore, sensitive to what we have called meaning’s intangibility, Socrates risks a formula that prompts an ironic comment on Glaucon’s part: τὸ ἀγαθόν, he declares, is “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, epekeina tes ousias). Glaucon laughs (“What a demonic/divine superiority!,” he exclaims) and Socrates accepts it (“It’s your own fault, you’ve pushed me to speak thus!,” he replies). For if things are nothing safe when they are something, and if they are something when we identify them as such and such by assigning to them such and such ideas (“bird,” “sunset,” etc.), then meaning as the condition of possibility of the ideas that we make of things cannot be but somehow beyond the beingness of the things themselves, which would not be apprehensible to us otherwise.
The next author in the history of philosophy to show some interest in this is Kant, with his concern not only with what we know, but with the conditions of possibility of our knowledge and its a priori forms. But in the 20th century two philosophers outstand in this sense too: Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein; independently from one another. Thus in The Prose of the World, his latest work, Merleau-Ponty talks of the non-objectual “fishing net” that must be kept – while the objectual fishes must be thrown away instead – in order to move from the realm of “perception” to that of “meaning.”(⭐︎) As for Wittgenstein, he writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus(⦶) that “a picture cannot depict its pictorial form: it displays it” (2.172), and that, in consequence, it cannot “place itself outside its representational form” (2.174). We have played with this idea here, after Roy Wagner’s glosses to Wittgenstein’s propositions in The Logic of Invention.(⦼) As Wagner therein observes, only humour can, perhaps, fully grasp (as it were, for it is ultimately ungraspable) meaning’s elusive reality, for humour consists – as Plato also knew – in taking things out of their ordinary perspective. Felipe Martínez Marzoa calls it to “make relevant,” i.e. perceptible and evident, “the game one is always-already playing,” and labels it as philosophy’s “insolent” gesture.(⊛)
(⊗) “Objects can only be named,” they “cannot be put into words,” says Wittgenstein (Tractatus 3.221). That is, words are the signs we use to name things, and hence what we say. Or again, we do not say the things themselves, we refer to them by saying such and such words. We are using here D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness’s translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
(⭐︎) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (ed. C. Lefort; trans. J. O’Neil; Evanston [IL]: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 47.
(⦶) See note (⊗) above.
(⦼) Roy Wagner, The Logic of Invention (Chicago: HAU Books, 2020), pp. 23-24.
(⊛) Felipe Martínez Marzoa, Ser y diálogo. Leer a Platón (Madrid: Istmo, 1996), p. 19.