``...We coordinate our action with other people. This is irrefutable. Human beings have the capacity to learn. This is irrefutable. Language is inherent to cognitive development. This is irrefutable. Linguistic interaction constitutes the medium of our capacity to understanding. This is irrefutable. When we seek to understanding something with someone, we presuppose, like it or not, that understanding (of some sort) is possible. This is irrefutable...''
Ken MacK -------
While much of that might be true, it still doesn't reduce to a colloquium of rational discourse as the only medium through which any or all or even most of our social understanding, knowledge or communication takes place.
And I would actually argue that learning, understanding, and communication takes place in many other ways that do not explicitly depend on language per se, but rather on a large variety of other symbolic systems, say mathematics and art, dance or sex for examples. In fact for each of the modes of understanding and kinds of knowledge that we might identify, there are mediums, all pre-immanently social, through which these understandings are both mediated and expressed, many of which are fundamentally non-linguistic.
I would even like to argue that the foundation of ethics, almost any ethics, is not rational discourse at all, but rather found in the psycho-motive registers of poetry, drama and stories of a lived life.
If I had to name a single historical source for an ethics of revolt, which is what I understand the ethical foundations of the Left to be, I would name Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, 430 bce. Aeschylus was completely emersed in the blood of war, tyrants, government overthrows, sleazy economic manipulations, a contentiously limited democracy and then its follies of empire that composed Fifth century Athens.
That is to say the ethical foundations of the left are grounded materially in political life and culturally configured as a tragic mythology of revolt.
In any case, the failure to recognize the extremely limited range of rational and discursive processes in both their development of and practices in social organization, blinds recognition to much more dominant and compelling processes and practices that constitute and configure the world. War and Capital for example. That these can be reduced to some formal language, doesn't mean that they arise from language---or, just because we can effect their reduction into rational discursive forms doesn't mean they exist and function solely as rational discursive form. So, then the logical necessity of following the conclusion of a well crafted argument is not at all the equivalent to the driven necessity of material means that move people to action. And, among those means, language, particularly formal discourse is perhaps the least effective of all, while we find that its own linguistic antithesis, impassioned and ennobling rhetoric, poetry, and the forceful persuasion of drama among the more effective means. That is to say propaganda, with all its lies, conceits, half-truths, low and dirty tricks of the mind and sensibility, melding illusion and reality together as art, works.
The distinction between a logical necessity and an ethical one, is argued in the play Prometheus Bound, when Hermes tries to convince Prometheus that his revolt is logically futile and self destructive. Prometheus tells Hermes to stuff it. He knows that Hermes is merely Zeus's lackey and is completely without honor, that is without an ethics of truth. In other words, Hermes is untrue to his own declared intentions. (Note Ken's signature, hmm.)
To the argument that all symbolic and representation systems have a grammar and can be considered language, doesn't persuade either. This equivalence between systems depends on deducing an abstract rational schema or structured table of relations then calling such forms grammars, but from among diverse systems that are constructed on entirely different ordering relations than grammars. If these relational components were all grammars, then their systems of elements would all be languages, but in concrete fact they are not language. To speak as if they were, is to presume that a mere figurative analogy carries the same logical necessity as does an isomorphism.
This grand isomorphism is the ultimate fantasy of discursive rationalism, which is to say that all social thought and action can be reduced to reason, so reason presupposes its own conclusive hegemony in advance. That we can use a linguistic means to understand a non-linguistic system doesn't persuade either, since this merges all categories of understanding into one, ignoring their fundamental differences, and does so in advance of its own understanding. It is this form of a priori reduction that lays at the foundation of reason and betrays its own arrogance of power.
In a mythic realm, one can say that reason is to human understanding what empire is to the world, a tyranny that has no limit. That the great ages of reason arise with great empires and their conquests can not be a mere coincidence of history. Ultimately these periods perforce the ideal conditions of freedom to mean absolute equivalence between identities, which is simply another way of saying: comply, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
Chuck Grimes