The Boundary of Violent Language Is the Boundary of a Violent World
— A Review of A Political Philosophy of Language and State (《语言与国家的政治哲学》)
Ma Siwei (马四维)
The boundary of political violent language is the boundary of political violence in the world. The world we live in is a world in which humankind achieves “consensus” through language; In five words: language is the world. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (《逻辑哲学论》), Wittgenstein (维特根斯坦) wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.). The extension of this is: the boundary of human language is the boundary of the world. The “boundary” is the “whole” that people can express in “language.”
The Wittgensteinian “boundary” here has a double meaning. First, an epistemic one: when language is reduced to a blend of slogans, insults, and conspiracy, the world we can perceive narrows accordingly; complexity, ambiguity, and the gray zone are erased and stances are replaced by binary partitions. Second, a practical one: when violent language is legitimized and normalized, the boundary of what violence can be done is pushed outward—what can be said aloud will, sooner or later, be acted upon. As a social fact, language has a self-fulfilling force: a community that uses phrases like “clean house” and “eliminate hostile elements” is already laying the groundwork of legitimacy for certain actions. Yu Xing (俞行) points out that for a state to realize freedom, equality, peace, democracy, and justice, public life must be placed within linguistic interaction; once public life is instead governed by physical interaction, freedom degrades into coercion, equality into obedience, peace into deterrence, democracy into performative voting, and justice into a procedural shell. This is the chain between violent political language and violent political incidents: not “first the event, then the rhetoric,” but “rhetoric itself is the incubator of the event.” For this reason, the real line of defense is not when the shot is fired but at the first crack in the field of discourse. When people condemn acts of political violence, do not forget to condemn the language of political violence.
Rhetorical violence precedes physical violence. The disintegration of language precedes the disintegration of institutions. The degradation of language is not merely a decline in stylistic morals; it marks the erosion of institutional foundations and the beginning of their unraveling. Yu Xing treats “commitment” as a key mechanism for organizing the state; contracts, oaths, rules, and predictability constitute the order of modern society. But with the spread of violent language, it is precisely commitment that collapses first. Narratives tinted by conspiracy and resentment depict opponents as “people unworthy of a promise,” thereby offering excuses for “breaching agreements,” “bypassing the law,” and “overstepping bounds.” Narratives aimed at purification and turmoil degrade “procedure” into “red tape obstructing the people’s will,” thereby winning cheers for breaking down doors. Once mutual recognition of commitments collapses, the legitimacy of rule-governed competition is swallowed by “ruleless victory and defeat.”
Wittgenstein’s logical philosophy offers a key to present political reality: language is not an appendage to an objective world; it is our way of reaching, organizing, and changing the world. In his A Political Philosophy of Language and State (《语言与国家的政治哲学》), the Canadian scholar Yu Xing hones this key into a full theoretical toolkit. He argues that the state originates in language, and that all the mechanisms by which the state is maintained and rationalized—requests for and provision of information, interpretation of shared meanings, expressions of attitude and honor, commitments and contracts, commands and law—are mediated by language; the five modern political ideals of freedom, equality, peace, democracy, and justice likewise arise from and are sustained by linguistic, not physical, interaction. Reading Wittgenstein’s “boundary” together with Yu Xing’s “origin,” we understand this: when a community lets its political language regress from rational, logical, and elegant to irrational, emotive, and coarse, it does more than debase taste; it quietly redraws the boundary of the state—retreating from the public space of language to the space of physical conflict, from disputable politics to assaultable politics.
Recent political reality in the United States provides a troubling scene for this proposition. The violence of political language shows itself first as a change in “grammar”: metaphors slip from “disagreement” and “deliberation” to “war” and “annihilation,” opponents from “citizens of differing views” to “enemies,” “vermin,” and “outsiders,” turning differences that should be resolved by argument into threats to be removed by cleansing. Second is a change in “pragmatics”: discourse turns from offering reasons for argument to inflaming emotion for mobilization; from propositions that can be refuted to signals and passwords that need no falsification. Third is a change in “media”: algorithms, with attention as their value core, amplify high-conflict, highly sensational expression; affective returns and traffic returns lock together, political performance is incentivized by platforms and in turn hijacks real politics. In this ecology, the linguistic order that Yu Xing calls for—achieving “common knowledge” through interpretation, building “rule-governed competition” through commitment, ensuring “procedural justice” through procedure—is swallowed step by step; the “grammar” of public life is replaced by the “grammar” of war, and the linguistic basis of democracy—intelligibility, disputability, negotiability—weakens. Thus what people learn from street and screen is no longer how to provide reasons, but how to produce slogans; no longer how to keep an opponent at the table, but how to justify throwing that opponent out of the room.
This logic applies not only to the United States; it illuminates China’s predicament on another front. When language is made ideological, polarized into friend and foe, reduced to slogans, and digitized, the space for rational policy discussion likewise contracts. Broad-brush labels like “foreign forces” (境外势力), “manipulating the narrative” (带节奏), and “wrong remarks” (错误言论) are semantically vague yet politically high-powered: they do not point to falsifiable propositions but to identities subject to reckoning; they do not encourage explanation and defense but demand alignment and silence. When procedural language (such as public argument, transparent evaluation, and contestable standards) is replaced by ritual language and struggle language, policy slips from “evidence-based correction” into “slogan-based cycles”; simple numbers plus simplified, thought-stunting catchphrases stand in for clear linguistic description; from the former “Five Stresses, Four Beauties and Three Loves” (五讲四美三热爱) to today’s “Three Stricts and Three Earnests” (三严三实) and “Eight Honors and Eight Shames” (八荣八耻). As society’s capacity to understand complex reality declines and its tolerance for dissent diminishes, the more language loses inclusiveness, the more the state’s boundary tilts toward “behavioral control” rather than “negotiation of meaning.”
Though their political systems differ, China and the United States encounter the same philosophical problem at the level of “language—and the state”: once language becomes a tool to mobilize violence, suppress interpretation, and break commitments, the modernity of the state runs in reverse. In this sense, Yu Xing’s “language progressivism” (语言进步主义) is not a culturalist stylistic preference but a principle of political engineering: social progress depends on the institutional tracks we lay for language. First, rebuild communities of information and interpretation. Shared facts and consensual concepts are the primary bulwark against conspiracist discourse; this requires media, education, and research to form “slow-variable” stabilizers whose supply of verifiable and interpretable knowledge offsets algorithmic preferences that feed on conflict. Second, restore the proper order of expressing attitudes. Honor and shame are the “soft law” of modern politics; they oblige public figures to be accountable for “giving reasons” rather than “manufacturing enemies.” When bottomless insult can buy clicks and votes, the public honor system must push back—punishing lies and incitement with transparent rules and rewarding restraint and negotiation. Third, strengthen the felt reality of commitments and procedures. Procedural justice is not an abstract slogan but a visible network of commitments; every adherence to procedure, every public debate, every protection of minority rights pushes the boundary of language toward a wider world. Fourth, temper the register of command. Commands are surely necessary to organize the state, but they must be encircled by interpretation, bounded by commitment, and filtered by procedure; when “command” vaults the guardrails of “interpretation—commitment—procedure,” it already carries the seed of violence in language.
Wittgenstein reminds us that the world does not wait outside language to be named; the language by which we live is the world in which we live. For the United States, to defuse the spread of violent political language, politics must first be brought back to the arena of “giving reasons”: debate over humiliation, evidence over codewords, policy over performance. By institutional design that lowers the click dividends of “emotionally pleasing news,” make reason-giving visibly rewarding and brawl-mongering visibly costly—this is a political calibration of algorithms and media ecology. For China, expanding the boundary of “what can be said,” reducing the fear of “what cannot be said,” and letting policy, facts, and rights be linguistically expressed, interpreted, and proceduralized is the key to preventing “the violence of silence” from turning into “the violence of action.” The tasks of both countries converge: let language again become the primary resource by which a state is organized, not the most convenient tool by which it is undone.
Turning to our own daily choices, returning to reason is not to flatten disagreement but to keep disagreement within language and refuse to hand it over to violence. By Wittgenstein’s measure, the boundary of language is not a static geography but a governable frontier: with schools, parliaments, courts, media, and platforms we lay brick upon brick for “language that can converse,” and the world extends an inch toward civilization; we indulge insult, tolerate hatred, and reward conspiracy, and the world retreats an inch toward barbarism. Yu Xing explains the state as “an entity formed by the merger of all media,” which means the state is not heaven-sent but a work of language and media; the quality of the work depends on the language by which we co-author it. If we acknowledge that “the boundary of violent language is the boundary of a violent world,” we must also acknowledge the converse: only language that is gentle, inclusive, precise, and honest can expand the world’s boundaries of freedom, equality, peace, democracy, and justice. May our politics relearn this ancient and difficult art: to meet in language, to contend in language, and to reach in language boundaries not of zero-sum annihilation but of a life we can share.