Philosophical Reflections

Ideal Language and Natural Language

Science uses ideal language, language in which every word has its own strictly determined meaning. In my opinion, this makes the word lose its universal meaning. Philosophy also tries to create its own ideal language. That is why the Western Philosophy turned into a senseless tattle and it doesn't contain anymore the wisdom which we can find in Eastern Philosophy. Words with one fixed meaning cannot describe the things' essence and observing the world with the help of them is useless. If there was no natural language there would be neither poetry nor fictional literature. On the other hand, analyzing the work written with ideal language requires analysis of every single word, which requires a huge effort of mind and leaving it strained. The text written with natural language helps person to analyze it without any problems, because they can hear native language since childhood and they have it linked with them so that analyzing the text written in their native language isn't a big problem for them (for those who don't read or read few of course it is a problem still, if not, there wouldn't be people who couldn't understand the books they have read). With ideal language it's not like this. Person is required to learn it before reading the text written in it, so they have to strain their mind while reading. This is why Western philosophical works develop person's ability for thinking.

What concerns the natural language, it is ambiguous because there are no enough words in any language to describe human's every feeling, every expression of conscience, every phenomenon of the world (this is why the ideal language is weak. It will have no enough words to describe the world and its phenomena). This is the advantage of the natural language. Differently from the ideal language, it can express every phenomenon. It can describe the world better.

The disadvantage of natural language is translation. Translating a text and especially poetry in another language always causes problems. But it is also the disadvantage of ideal language. The Western scientific society members who are used to using the ideal language have problems with translating and analyzing the Eastern philosophical texts. Japanese language is fictionally rich and is known for the multiplity of the ambiguous words, so the ideal language will never express Japanese (and not only Japanese, but other languages') essence of world-outline, the philosophy of Japanese people. Also, Japanese can express people's hard feelings in one word, for example, 'Hanami' means 'being delighted by the beauty of flowers'. To express this one word other languages will need multiple words. It is a problem of translation that Heidegger talked about.

The truth is the synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophies. Conformably, the truth is their methods' synthesis. In my opinion, it is better to refuse to try to create the ideal language and use natural language for philosophy, but add explanation to the vague discussion that is incomprehensible for the reader.