Page 24 - Critical and Cultural Theory

MEANING
express nor manifest actual things. Words are radically divorced
from things. 2
Aristotle's views were later revamped by Empiricism, the philo-
sophical tradition commonly associated with Francis Bacon (1561
-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704),
George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-76). Empiri-
cism followed Aristotle in believing that words name ideas and
that ideas refer to things. Language is a distorting medium, for
words are potentially obfuscating substitutes for ideas. Ideas are
understood and shared concepts and words must embody such
concepts unequivocally. If they do not, they are empty and
misleading (Locke). Words that do not correspond to ideas are
unscientific and unreliable. Berkeley, however, believed that words
without ideas may still have a function - for example, in affecting
people's behaviour, passions and emotions. Even if a word does
not unproblematically correspond to an idea, it may still produce
certain effects and hence certain meanings. Immanuel Kant (1724—
1804) refuted the Empiricist approach by asserting the importance
of judgment. This faculty enables human beings to bridge the gap
between the phenomenal world (the natural world as we perceive
it) and the noumenal world (the world of ideas). According to
Kant, we never know things as they truly are - as things-in-them-
selves - but only in terms of how they appear to us - as phenom-
ena. In the phenomenal world, we perceive objects but cannot
truly know them because we are only confronted with their
surface appearances, not with their intrinsic essences. When we
exercise judgment (particularly aesthetic judgment), we are still
tied to appearances but are also able to detect a pattern in them
3
which gives us a glimpse of the noumenal world. Judgment is also
the mediating factor between words and things, language and
reality.
Kant's theories were redefined by the nineteenth-century philo-
sophical movement known as German Idealism and associated
with the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) and Georg Wilhelm

2 i*~ This concept plays a key role in poststructuralist approaches to language, as
shown in Part I, Chapter 3, 'Rhetoric'.
3
**~ Kant's theories are discussed further in Part III, Chapter 2, The Aesthetic'.
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