ABSTRACT
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s protagonist has one avenue left open to him: if he is to retain the cognitive primacy of individual sense-experience over ‘the universal’, that is, over general grammatical rules expressing a particular life-form, he must deny the adequacy of language. The limits of language are the limits of human knowledge or sense experience. There is nothing about sense impressions which can be known or even meant without being expressible in language. Mastery of language and knowledge of the world are one and the same activity. To disregard human culture, as Hegel and Ludwig Wittgenstein encourage their respective protagonists to do, is to commit oneself to solipsistic silence. For this reason a language game is given sense by virtue of the possible use of its expressions in other language games. Hegel’s protagonist is not prevented from saying what he means because language is inadequate, but because his meaning, as unsayable, is inadequate as meaning.
