Listening to Who’s Talking: The Speakers as Context

The chapter explores the role and positions of the speakers as a central ethical context for appreciating the meaning of saying and listening to the words ‘I love you’. I begin with the Wittgensteinian idea that the act of uttering a sentence in a concrete context has often eluded the formal logical analysis of sentences and thus left the analysis incomplete or incapable of accounting for the meaning of the sentence, that is, its use in context. I then consider the limitations of formal logic as a tool for understanding what with Wittgenstein could be called the depth grammar of declaring one’s love and acknowledging that one is being loved. By considering how changes in pronouns change the meaning of words of love, I submit that an analysis of declarations, affirmations, and acknowledgements of loving and being loved, in terms of ‘x loves y’, leaves out central distinctions in the ethical and spiritual significance of me saying ‘I love you’ and ‘You love me’, and notoriously fails to capture the possibility of saying and thinking ‘we love each other’, and how such a realization fundamentally changes the context and relationship from within one both speaks and listens to words of love. I end with a consideration of how attention to the contexts surrounding these two ways of speaking about the experience of love can help illuminate a relevant distinction at work in Wittgenstein’s thought on ethics and religion.