The Phenomenological Significance and Relevance of the Reminders Assembled as “Language-Games”

Abstract

The phenomenological significance of Wittgenstein’s reminders assembled as “language-games” are presented here with those aspects relevant to interpreting the ancient idea of Logos by understanding how concepts with rules operate and picture the logic of thinking, meaning, naming, intending, showing anything significantly. That “thing” may be something like a means of representation as the Use of a naming sign, as well as the Use of something named as “object” which both signify their identity and difference as a “name” or an “object named” with the signifying Use of other signs in the manifest stream of phenomena, from which reminders assembled as “language-games” present cross-strips. What is elucidated as such is also the trans-historical significance of these reminders as they elucidate the ultimate internal connections of the use of pictures of historical-language-games with the manifest signifying stream of phenomena as the ultimate limits of saying, showing, meaning, representing anything in language.

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.¹

Psychological – trivial – discussions of expectation, association, etc. always leave out what is really remarkable, and you notice that they talk around, without touching on the vital point.²

Only surrounded by certain manifestations of life, is there such a thing as an expression of pain. Only surrounded by an even more far-reaching particular manifestation of life, such a thing as the expression of sorrow or affection and so on.³

–Wittgenstein