The relationship that exists between the world of logic and the world of experience is one of the most important themes in philosophy, because the philosophical ability (the philosophical technique) consists precisely in know how to mediate: know which categories, what are the appropriate terms, what are appropriate questions and non-appropriate questions. All philosophical technique consists of this. It’s not about an ‘art of thinking’ because thinking we already know spontaneously. Nor is it about “perceive reality”, because we can do that as well. The problem is the articulation between these two things: it is how to think about reality, not about thinking about anything.

Without this constant exercise of going back from thoughts to reality, we may become fundamentalists, no longer making sure that the sentences in which we say believe correspond to something in reality. You would take sentences as such — as sentences — and clings to them. Of course this is of total irrationality, but it’s the norm in virtually every public discussion these days. Rarely does one appear who is aware of the terms he is using (which may have been taken from the politics of economics, religion, etc) that must be translatable in terms of a recognizable experience — by himself first, and by his listener, in second.

The gulf between personal, real experience and general schemas (the general concepts, the general sentences we use to reason about it) is the constant today. This evidently denotes a situation of barbarism and irrationality, where all discussions (without exception) are useless, because they never refer to anything at all. It is the exchange of things that are worth nothing for others that are worth nothing either. It is exchanging words for words. These words often, though they have no phatic meaning (do not refer to anything), serve as emblems of personal attitudes: the subject thinks that speaking certain things (or certain phrases) qualifies him as a good, decent, respectable person; while speaking other phrases qualifies him as evil, wicked — a reprobate, in short. Then the words are used as personal emblems, as if the subject stuck some badges on the body.

There are things that have identifiable logical content but nothing in the experience. For example, if I say, “The yellow dragon with red balls, which speaks japanese”. It is a very clear concept — logically, there is no contradiction. But this is contradictory, not with logic (not with itself), but with reality. Dante said that grammar is the material construction of thought. Logic is the ideal construction of thought (i.e., what concepts it corresponds to) — if you have no idea of material construction, you will have much less of the logical syntax of the thing. Rhetoric is the psychological construction: the adaptation of that to the real situation of communication. Note that none of these three gives us the objective content of the language: one speaks of the construction material; the other of ideal connections; the third, the speech and communication situation. None of these three can teach us how to connect thoughts and reality — this is the philosophical technique itself.