LANGUAGE AS A SYMBOLIC CODE OF CULTURAL EXISTENCE

Abstract

The analysis of the study is focused on the philosophical reflection of the language phenomenon. Language appears as a symbolic code of the people's cultural existence. As a category of existence, that is, in its metaphysical, symbolic role, language is a condition for ethnogenesis - the process of the formation of an ethnos, community, people. The historical significance of language is not defined only by its instrumentality. Understanding this phenomenon requires a person to deeply reflect, to realize the role of language in the formation of an individual picture of the world, in involving a person in the socio-cultural environment. As a symbolic phenomenon, language retains the meaning of the primary element of individual and social existence. Its internal unity, integrity, ensures the consolidation of society. Therefore, any attempts to manipulate language lead to disunity, rupture, and social existence crisis.
Attempts to look at language as a condition of human cultural existence, proposed by the author, allow us to recreate the logic of the creation of being as a process, first of all, meaning-making. Since we are talking about the metaphysical nature of language, its influence on the socio-cultural existence of a person. The sacred nature of language is its ability to reproduce cultural and social existence by human. This process manifests itself in human’s existential desire for communication. Since communication, in fact, is the source of all forms of sociality that exist in the modern world – ethnicity, community, publicness. Therefore, it is noted that the situation of the languages diversity, their historical branching and differentiation, does not affect the ontological unity of language, its status and role. Since language always retains the status of the leading category of being. All the diversity of language is concentrated around its primary element, which is meaning. In turn, the carrier of meaning in a word is the root - the inner meaning, which is manifested in the variations of different dialects of the language. And it is the preservation and transmission of this inner meaning that is responsible for the development and stability of the language, as well as the historical perspective of society itself.