Chapter 1 of Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene deals with the importance of language as a gift for the rise of human culture. Through the language, it is possible to transfer experiences, skills, traditions. The language itself seems to shape thinking and actions. Negative traditions are surely included, and human violence is part of nowadays, the age of the human struggle to dominate nature. As stressed by Heidegger, language has some limits. It is never fully shared and, as a consequence, one cannot completely translate a thought or a poem. It is a fluid process ‘Language is like some kind of infinitely interfertile family of species spreading or mysteriously declining over time, shamelessly and endlessly hybridizing, changing its own rules as it goes’, as Gary Snyder (1990, p. 7) remarks. Concerning this point, it is interesting to consider Wittgenstein’s view of language as social practice. Writers and communicators are always told to think about the audience that they are speaking to and to craft their communication techniques accordingly. Wittgenstein’s philosophy pushes this point of view beyond linguistics into ethnography. In order to communicate with a social tribe, listen to how they play with language. In many cases, slang, banter, and jokes are not poorly structured ‘secondary’ forms of communication, but a coded means of crafting pointed exchanges within a community. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words, but a well-timed joke can express a world-view. Wittgenstein once said that a ‘serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes’. Still, some degree of shared language is certainly within the reach of humankind. The bridge language can address the practical challenges between people that do not share a way of communication. The traditional lingua franca of our times is surely represented by English. It opens up an opportunity for integrating existing ideas into new, more inclusive narratives and models that are able to capture the complexities and shape the intricacies of life. The conclusions of the author include the importance of a dialogue that is opening at this very moment is about sharing a channel of communication between humans and humans, as well as between humans and non-humans in order to address the injustices between humans and humans, as well as the inequities between humans and non-humans. As language by its very nature divides the world and constructs borders between things in the world, it would not make sense to attempt to deny the categories of different entities (such as nature and culture), but we should instead embrace all objects as they are: unique and intrinsically valuable (Heikkurinen et al., 2016).
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