[Unstagram] The Words of Things That Cannot Be Said

The season of words has arrived in a country overflowing with speech. Wittgenstein's philosophical world is often easily quoted with the sentence, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). Rather than an academic citation, it is spotlighted as a weapon to block the interlocutor's speech in the sense of "If you don't know, don't speak." The more skilled one is at realizing desires through means, the more they tend to condense language and obscure the essence. The success or failure of agitation depends on the preemption of words. It is about preempting the world that cannot be explained by words, leading with words that are not really words.

Things that cannot be spoken do not apply as philosophical propositions; rather, they were the tasks philosophy needed to advance further. As the elderly Wittgenstein acknowledged, "The most important and mysterious things in life lie precisely in what cannot be spoken," the world existing outside (philosophical) language is vaster and more complex. Truth lies outside language, yet people try to build the fortress of truth with language. The reality of the world also exists larger and more solidly in places not governed by words. Language itself is imperfect, endlessly changing in relation to the complex and ambiguous world, partially developing and, to that extent, also being destroyed.

The glass in the window frame is a window that looks outside and a mirror that reflects the inside. The same goes for words. (Seoul, 2013)

Language includes the desire to speak even about things that cannot be spoken, but the precise user of language speaks only what can be spoken while showing what cannot be spoken like a shadow. Indirect language reaches and is read only by those who can recognize it. Astronomers say they see storms of star explosions, collisions, creation, and extinction even in the periodic table of elements. The world hidden in the remainder of the objects indicated by language, visible only to those who see it, extends to the universe. The greater essential world, which cannot be captured by the "net of language" as Heidegger said but is recognized only by those who perceive it, lies beyond what is visible and within the unspeakable. Professor Lee Gi-sang, a philosopher who studied Heidegger, wrote, "In the age of myth, humans knew there were things that could not be grasped by human language. With the advent of the age of Logos, by recognizing only what can be grasped by language, humans lost much" (Being and Time).

Words are a window to view the world and a mirror reflecting oneself. People reveal what they do not say while speaking.

Trees exist both above the ground and underwater. This is not about real or fake, but about existence itself. (Seongnam, 2021)