Language and Freedom

The causal independence of language from the objects that it represents, generally agreed-upon by most Philosophers of Language, possibly except for some Mythological formations, conversely demonstrates the freedom of Language from those objects. Hence, the Freedom that Sartre attributes to linguistic Consciousness conforms with the mainstream. However, the Ontological status of linguistic processes, e. g. speaking, is, in his scheme, Being-for-others. Therefore, he allows that Being-for-itself is, at minimum, not the exclusive source of Ontological Freedom. Furthermore, this classification of the Being of Language aligns him with the likes of Mead, for whom Consciousness is primarily a linguistic medium, and a social medium. Hence, it tends to support the thesis previously proposed here--that even within Sartre's own scheme, Being-for-itself is only Ontologically derivative, the product of an internalization, by Conscious Being, of its Being-for-others, that first generates the subject-object split that constitutes Being-for-itself. And, since Being-for-itself is the locus of Ontological Freedom for Sartre, Language is therefore the source of that Freedom.