On the philosophical remedy of the 21st century for the philosophical language disease of the 20th century - developed here in Israel
The choice of the central theme in a period's philosophy has a profound, decisive, and long-term impact on culture - one that cannot always be predicted in advance. Such was the case with the philosophy of language. There are achievements in every philosophical era that stem from the very innovation of a new philosophy. For example - scientific achievements arising from new perceptions of reality capable of describing phenomena in novel ways (DNA as the language of biology, information as quantum language, the dominance of language over modern mathematics, and the language machine - computer). This is prominent in the exact sciences, against the backdrop of their objectivity, but is also true in the humanities and arts (where the influence is sometimes direct - literally deriving the desired from the theory). But alongside these achievements, there are also failures, and sometimes catastrophes, that can stem even from peripheral aspects of that philosophy.
The philosophy of language is responsible for the cultural deterioration after World War II. In short - language is too superficial (in fact, we've known this throughout history, which is why a philosophy that places language at the center of the worldview has never arisen). Ultimately, language is the surface of a system, and communication and information (the two most popular derivatives of the idea of language) are only secondary expressions of deeper phenomena, but we preferred to get stuck in them as if they were everything. Language is also too formal by nature - and too distant from content. Therefore, the philosophy of language creates a superficial culture, lacking the depth of culture in the Kantian and epistemological era (which are fundamentally forms of depth: man as a cave within the world).
Language is also impotent, having no power of its own in the world, and therefore engagement in "discourse" is impotent. The separation between language and power has created a culture that has no power and influence, and criticizes power from the outside, while washing its hands in linguistic purity. Language purification rituals fill the "discourse," which is always busy pouncing on or being shocked by someone who said something. Facebook is the language company - everyone talks, and speech has no value, and nothing accumulates. This is the oral society. Google, not coincidentally separate, is the written society - and it is the accumulating library of the entire world, the repository of language and its memory, organized without a cultural hierarchy of depth and content, but only a power hierarchy (only the strong maintain sites that are strong in Google). A news site will always be above interesting independent content. Unlike a library, where there is a relatively built-in democracy between books all on the shelf, Google reflects the power relations in the world. Because language has no power of its own, and no content higher than others or depth in itself, only power relations.
Facebook is the speech company, and Google is the writing company, and the separation between them is not a glitch, but reflects the linguistic conceptual (and brain) separation between writing and speech. Facebook has no memory and no effective search not because of a technological limitation, but because the philosophical linguistic perception is that this is not part of speech, which is self-consuming, while in Google we have no flexibility to control sources (like friends) and no immediacy ("newsworthiness") and updated feed, meaning it is "out of time," again not because of a technological barrier, but because the same linguistic philosophy defines it within the limitations of writing - and under the fixed structure of writing. Therefore, if a site that was on Google disappears, we protest - but we have no expectations for content preservation from Facebook, and perhaps the opposite. The result of the takeover of the linguistic idea over the world is the Internet in its current form: the result of the ideas of writing and speech, as the two modes of language, is Google and Facebook, and the result of the idea of language itself, without content hierarchy, is lack of reading and lack of listening. When the philosophy of language took over the world - the world turned into gibberish.
Therefore, when we choose a new philosophy for the 21st century to replace the language philosophy of the 20th century, we must choose a philosophy that puts at its center a concept entirely different from language. A concept that by its nature and at the most basic level of understanding, which will always be the one that permeates deepest from philosophy to the world - depth (a crude word in the age of language). And perhaps, in order to fight linguistic shallowness and cultural gibberish, a concept that embodies depth, hierarchy, and the superiority of content over form, a concept that is itself the cure for the disease - and this concept is learning. Learning is the foundation of depth and its purpose, and by nature includes appreciation and innovation in one sandwich, while language allowed (by its nature!) only free innovation without appreciation. What's called: blah blah blah. In language, one can say anything. But we learn only what has value. Language is inherently easy. Learning is inherently difficult. In learning, there are internal power mechanisms, and it is the muscles that operate language from within, while language is only the bones and simple skin of the world. Because learning is content - and language is form.
True, the human being (and the human condition) is expressed in language, but what stands behind language and drives it is learning in the brain (in the case of the individual) and learning in culture (in the case of society) - the development of culture in history. Money is perhaps the language of the world (and the stock market is the translator of all value into money) - but it is the learning process of growth, investment, and entrepreneurship that drives the development of the economy. Computer language is perhaps the language of the computer - but what develops the software is a learning process, whether by the human programmer and algorithmic researcher, or by a learning algorithm (an option becoming increasingly dominant). Mathematics is perhaps a logical language, but everything that stands behind it and behind the proof of its theorems is an enormous learning process, one of the hardest humanity has faced. The obsessive preoccupation with academic language (publications, writing rules, citations) has severely damaged academic learning and its innovation, for the university is supposed to be a huge learning mechanism in the service of humanity - not a language community preserving its own esoteric and sectarian language. And even in literature - the inferior preoccupation with language comes at the expense of content, namely depth. On the damage caused by linguistic ideology to distinctly anti-linguistic fields such as painting or classical music - there is no need to elaborate. The philosophy of language simply destroyed these fields in its dominance - while learning will rehabilitate them.
Language itself is by nature unconscious, it is the self-evident and effortless that underlies everything, and therefore it creates a critical and conspiratorial-childish worldview, seeking to expose and reveal and pull the rug out from under things and speakers (because language is as deep as a rug). While learning is by nature a process requiring effort, and it is the understood beneath everything, being accumulative - a layered building process in which more and more height, hierarchies, understanding, content - and depth are accumulated. Learning indeed starts from the lowest (learning of neurons in the brain) but rises and accumulates to the highest (cultural learning). Therefore, in language there is a destructive and disassembling component, being a rather low process (what are the protocols of a network - on the internet or in the brain for example - compared to its content layers?), while learning is an inherently constructive worldview. Language is inherently lacking hierarchy - is speaking Hebrew better than speaking German? Why this wordplay and not another, of sticking out one's tongue or evil tongue? - while learning by nature creates enormous cultural towers (Jewish culture, German culture).
It's no coincidence that the metaphor of the game was chosen as the most central metaphor of language philosophy. Language is ultimately a children's game, acquired in the childish stage of man, while learning is an enterprise for adults - and maturation itself. Therefore, placing the concept of learning at the center of culture and philosophy - instead of language - will produce a more mature and profound culture. Unlike language, which is by nature a timeless concept, describing a given state in the present of a certain system, learning always organizes the system from the direction of the past to the future, because of the construction, and therefore it is more suitable for conceptualizing a dynamic, accelerating world facing the future. The philosophy of learning is the paradigmatic example of the philosophy of the future.
The Netanya School has dedicated its research in recent years to the philosophical world of learning. It develops this world - in its many facets - in dozens of articles on our sites, and recently even in the collection of introductory essays it created (
link). The most basic and comprehensive conclusion arising from the entirety of its research is that learning is a concept no less fertile and rich than the concept of language, and with the potential for revolutionary and fundamental contribution to all fields of knowledge and culture - and therefore a leading candidate for a new paradigm of thought, which can replace the "linguistic turn" with a "learning turn." The philosophy of learning, as a replacement for the philosophy of language, will be able to gradually change humanity's worldview - and even the technology created in its image and likeness. An internet network in a learning era will add learning and evaluation mechanisms to every platform, thereby taking flat platforms and networks, lacking inherent learning mechanisms, like Google and Facebook - and turning them into deep networks whose essence is learning and not communication. Just as the essence of the human brain network is not communication or discourse between neurons or information transfer between them but learning - and only in learning lies the ability and uniqueness of this network: its intelligence. Indeed, language is unique to humans, but it is only a unique characteristic - not its essence. While the unique essence of man is learning.