Skip to main content

Defining the Definition: The Life of Language and the Language of Life

Nothing can be defined through words. We simply play a game of words to replace one word for others. Just like dictionary keeps replacing words in the process of making the meaning of a word clear. For any beginner of language who doesn't have clarity about any single word will puzzle the dictionary. He will go on thinking what if dictionary is in mood to play a game to create confusions? Dictionary for such amateur is an end product of funny game, which revolves around a circular structure without availing any stable result.


When I ask  to define the definition itself. And one begins to define the definition with a presupposition of its meaning  already keeping in mind that definition can be defined. In the process of defining definition one forgets that the value one is going to capture or assign through definition is preceding the definition itself. Just like God or Infinity cannot be defined by finite being. Likewise the meaning of definition which precedes the words in defining the definition cannot be defined by words. In that sense, the edifice of modern day law, rooted in language and its defining capabilities is a game for those who love interpreting and defining it in every day realities. And the quest to bring certainty in law remains an attempt to hold sand firmly through fists but the essence of law eludes the language games. 


One can say that we the human species invented these signs as  language to amuse ourself or consume our lifetime for a thing whose grounding is fictitious. We go on inventing and investing in fictions and then ask what is real in fiction. We love forgetting our finite reality for we continue coining new concepts and its intricacies like a complicated thread invented by spiders to believe that this is something and somewhere, could be felt as life and its totality. We the spiders of language are playing the games with a firm belief that everything expressed in language is as true as air, water, and Earth. For we use a fancy term, like social fact to express its reality. In fact, no social fact provides any description of fact, but a prescription based upon general understanding. In that sense every social reality is a fiction based upon social contract which appears to be a defining feature of human's life. Our sources of anxiety and salvation are nowhere but in the language itself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Meeting Justice Rohinton Nariman in a Sunday Morning

Aristotle once wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that there are four significant virtues for human beings, namely Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. There are a few judges who have courage and sense of justice, both. Hon'ble Mr. Justice Rohinton Nariman has been truly an exemplar judge and erudite historian, theologian and philologist, a great scholar of music as well as a courageous and meticulous jurist of our country. He did his Master of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1980-81 and taught by one of the finest jurists of the last century, Roberto Unger. He became Senior Advocate in 1993 in the age of 37 and also served as Solicitor General of India in 2011 before he was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India in 2014. He delivered many landmark judgments, including Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. There are a few people with whom time moves too fast, but to count that experience takes ages. Justice Rohinton Nariman is one of those great jurists with whom a meet...
1 comment
Read more

The Rhythm of Law: A Book Review

Book Cover of the Book Law is the subject and object of curiosity since the ancient civilizations started its journey of contemplation about the order within the nature; its mysterious paths inspired the germination of metaphysics. Initially, human's mode of existence lived as instinctual life as per the call of nature. Instincts were primarily used as a medium for survival and to receive the call of wisdom from the “order of nature”. Humans are primarily one of the modes of expression of the nature, as Spinoza calls it attributes which express the essence of God and modes which are derived from the essence of God or nature (Spinoza, Ethics). The doorway of all the laws, as brooding presence of harmony, may be received if one is alert to recognize its call. Prof. Raman Mittal has penned a beautiful book titled “The Rhythm of Law”. The uniqueness of the book is its potentialities to express the inexpressible wisdom. Martin Heidegger in his Magnum Opus, Being and Time, expresses the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Violence of Law and Ethics of Care

The worldliness of world is constituted by care (Martin Heidegger). Only in our concernfull dealing with the things around, the existence of being may be understood. In our everydayness of care and concern the world appears to our consciousness. Care is the language, a nomos of our existence, yet it is hardly perceptible in a world of law, which was rightly defined by Hans Kelsen and Max Weber as “legitimate use of violence”. The monopoly of political state over the violent nature of law makes it the most elevated institutions in relation to various social orders co-existing with the political state. Politics, once conceived as “an art of possibilities” by Harold Laski, is now becoming merely a language of allegations, counter-allegations, trickery and manipulation, in one statement, it symbolizes the archetypical character of violence whose expression is apparent in the existence of law. Violence has become our mode of existence in a sense that it speaks through us when the humanity f...
Post a Comment
Read more