Conclusion

Abstract

Having finished our story it might be useful to look back and remark that it began with astonishment and also ended in astonishment; but whereas in the beginning of the book, astonishment played the role of what generates a difficulty of expression and challenges the sense-making capacities of language, in the end of the book we found the possibility of astonishment at the sense-making capacities of language itself, at how much can be done with language. An example of this transition is the case of the earlier-discussed Dostoyevskian description where prince Muishkin’s hesitation “but how am I to describe it?” gives place to a creatively rich description that can also leave the reader in awe of language. A similar transition from an experience of astonishment as what evokes a sense that there is something language cannot do to the astonishment at language itself was also witnessed in the Lecture on Ethics when Wittgenstein describes that the only appropriate way to express the miracle that the world exists is through the miracle that language exists.

A prayer [εὐχή] is a form of speech [λόγος], but it is neither true nor false.

Aristotle, De Interpretatione

The sheer naming of things, the creation of words, is the human way of appropriating and, as it were, disalienating the world into which, after all, each of us in born as a new comer and a stranger.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind