This one’s for you Thien 🙂

“Is writing not a fine thing…? Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a manner?” Susan Barton, Foe (pg. 58)

Language has become increasingly important to me as I get older. This is not to say that I think of myself as being particularly verbose or that I even feel like I have a strong grasp of the words available to me from the English lexicon. (Although, lexicon is a particularly cool word – it’s all about the exotic sound of the X juxtaposed with the authority of the CON. Exotic and juxtaposed are two more cool words. Maybe I just have a thing for X‘s?) What I realise now is that language is a boon. It is the only symbolic structure that we have to create general consensus regarding common phenomena. 

What? you say. What about mathematics? Isn’t the symbolic nature of mathematics more accurate than any of the fumbling attributes that we assign to English words? Especially so because words can hold different meanings in different contexts, while mathematics simply is? 

Sure. 

But we don’t speak with maths in general conversation. We have also grown to rely on how unspecific our use of language is. We populate it with other symbols in order to create context. We gesture, and flare our nostrils, and twist our mouths this way and that. Our enunciation plays a role in developing meaning and we’re so easily confused when confronted with someone whose visible and physical vocabulary is surprisingly different to what we are used to. 

But this is beside the point of what I was thinking about. If we are known only through the physical phenomena of experience and then, subsequently put to memory through the lexicon of our available vocabulary, isn’t our understanding of the world, including the people in it, necessarily downgraded in quality to the maximum quota of linguistic value we can give it individually? 

I’ve always been frustrated by linguistic philosophy because I found the idea of undermining the meaning of the way in which we make meaning to be a thoroughly unfulfilling prospect. But, as I’ve aged I’ve started to see that the very purpose of linguistic philosophy is to highlight the flimsiness of the meaning that we ascribe to the things we say that we understand. It’s actually got very little to do with language and everything to do with what language means to us. The words that we are able to wield give us a certain fighting value (if that makes sense), but this value only comes into play against people who are capable of understanding the power of the words we’ve used. George Orwell understood this too well when he explored how the restriction of language in Nineteen Eighty-Four through the creation of newspeak actually disabled the populace. They were no longer capable of fighting bigger fights or asking bigger questions because they lacked the linguistic grounding to form the thoughts that were required to reach the questions they wanted to ask. The process actually resulted in them being entirely unable to even comprehend of questions that fell outside of the framework designed by the totalitarian state. The book suggests that there is a foreboding sense of unease in the populace through the character of Winston, but at the same time that unease is wordless. It cannot be expressed because it cannot be understood. It is reduced to a phrase that has none of the nuance that is required; bad, or ungood, or at its most extreme level, minus good. A statement of dissatisfaction that is generated out of an expression that something terrible is merely lacking in what is considered to be the positive good. This demolition of the scaffolding for expression not only undermines many of the normal pathways of conversation but it actually amputates entire aspects of the individual’s will to understand. 

A friend of mine raised this problem with linguistic philosophy a few weeks ago and it has played on my mind since. The problem, that undermining the way we make meaning is fundamentally meaningless because there is no other method available to us, is unphilosophical. That is not to say that it has no value or that a philosophical problem would be more worthy of discussion. The fact that it is unphilosophical is actually the precise reason why it is such an interesting thing to consider. Philosophy, in my experience, is a frontiersman’s game. It is a discipline that values exploration regardless of the potential payoff. This is probably where it differs most importantly from science which is primarily interested in the facts that are born of its efforts. Philosophy sincerely hopes to find truths, I believe, but it is acutely aware that truth is a wily beast (if it is a beast in any sense of the term) and that sometimes one must fight the enemy where he isn’t. 

To reach the conclusion that linguistic philosophy merely points out holes in our only system for making meaning is to severely underestimate what it is actually interested in. If we accept that communication exists so that people can best evolve through deliberation, bartering, dancing, whatever, then mustn’t we examine the necessarily vagaries of our input/output processing? If you were to describe your favourite Game of Thrones character to me, am I then going to be able to describe that character as you understand them to someone else? No. Yet we rely on one another to create reasonably accurate re-representations of the things that we impart. And what is perhaps most concerning about this is that most of the time we’re fairly indifferent to this authorial transience. I figure that this means one of two things: either we talk an awful lot about things that hold no real value to us – so much so that we don’t really care about how it is misrepresented in a future telling by a third party, or we uphold the deluded perspective that when we are detailed by some future story-teller we are explored with uncommonly rose-tinted lenses. 

Thus, to suggest that we live forever, in any sense of that phrase, is actually to commit to a fairly simple linguistic falsehood. Who we are and what we have done is fundamentally in the eye of the beholder and, moreover, that eye is more-often-than-not disinterested, distracted, or three-parts blind. The memories that we hope to generate in the minds of our loved ones, or the populace at large, are impossibilities because they are necessary distortions of a truth that was never anything more than an undoubtedly ego-fueled impression of what existed blurred by what we hoped to be the case. The fact of the matter is that in order to live forever one would actually have to live forever. And even then, one would have to accept that the person they became would be a necessary stranger to the person they were once before. 

Finally, the point that we’ve reached is something like this: communication through language, in all its forms, is a game that we play. Some of us are better at it than others and so we can play more talented and tricky/insightful opponents.  

And even beyond that, communication is an ocean of possibility, a quagmire of despondence, and we are all adrift in it amidst a fog that blinds us from one another. The water, if it can be called that, has no friction and we have no paddles, and the air is so thin as to make our voices mere squeaks amongst near-vacuum. We go where the ocean takes us and it is only with skill that we might change our course, and it is only with hope that we might meet others who struggle to change their course in the same direction.