Getting stuck inside language

Light and Language

The Buddha continued, "Then suppose another person understood only four lines of this Sutra, but nevertheless took it upon themselves to explain these lines to someone else. This person's merit would be even greater than the other person's. Why? Because all Buddhas and all the teachings and values of the highest, most fulfilled, most awakened minds arise from the teachings in this Sutra. And yet, even as I speak, Subhuti, I must take back my words as soon as they are uttered, for there are no Buddhas and there are no teachings.

Subhuti, when the Buddha speaks of particles of dust, it does not mean I am thinking of any definite or arbitrary thought, I am merely using these words as a figure of speech. They are not real, only illusion. It is just the same with the word universe; these words do not assert any definite or arbitrary idea, I am only using the words as words. - Diamond Sutra

This is how I interpret these passages of the Diamond Sutra: even as I use these words to help you achieve enlightenment, I must retract my words– as I don’t want you treating these words as having independent meanings. All I am doing is using words to help you to become enlightened– but these words are in fact nonsense when taken on their own.

Words can be just words. They don’t need to be anything other than that.

I don’t think that this (apparently) Zen insight is usually taken to be an enlightening thing. Many are wracked by the fear that we are speaking nonsense. We fear that we increasingly are speaking, in a somewhat recent philosophical work that became a best seller, “bullshit.”

In politics we see it in myriad forms: whether its right-wing grifters who complain that ‘gender’ has no meaning any more online, the protagonists of the pro-science, anti-postmodern “grievance studies” affairs which regularly accuse social science of having become nothing other than word play, the swarms of controversies surrounding “woke/anti-woke” language politics, and more.

In literature, Samuel Beckett, among others, played with and explored this insight.

In twentieth century academic philosophy, reactions to this insight has been expressed in the ambiguity of Wittgenstein, especially in his image of a ladder which shares a very similar structure to this Zen insight (climbing up the ladder of nonsense and then taking the nonsense down after its finished)–the negative response to Richard Rorty’s Mirror of Nature’s anti-representationalism (representationalism meaning that words represent things, encapsulated in the image of a mirror) and in the repeated use of Derrida’s slogan “there-is-no-outside-text” as a bogeyman to epitomize everything allegedly wrong about contemporary French philosophy, among other things.

People react fearfully: words can’t be just words. They have to be something more.

People fear being stuck inside language.

But why? Why do some feel stuck inside language? Why must words be more than words?

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Consider someone who emphatically holds to the negation of the idea that “words are just words.” Words are always more than words. To rephrase my metaphor, they would think that words point to something real, beyond themselves. Rather than thinking that all words are nonsense, they think that all words, in the strongest possible sense, have sense. They would believe something along the lines of:

Everything, in principle, can possibly make sense. Everything in principle could makes sense in a way that can be communicated. Everything has a word. Everything has a concept. These words reflect the way the world actually is.

This thesis is a thesis about the nature of intelligibility. The easiest metaphor for intelligibility, one that seems to be etymologically linked to the concept in every culture I know something about, is light. Light makes things able to show up for us, and so light practically makes things make sense to us. This thesis says, metaphorically, that light can possibly be shown on Everything. Our lights, our words, can shine at anything real, which reflects and hits our eyes/ears in such a way that we could possibly understand it.

There are three people who most certainly, emphatically believed that “everything could make sense.” They believed in a (uniquely Greek) conception of light. And in looking at the histories of these defenses, I think we might catch a reason why people are scared of the dark– why people are scared of being stuck inside language.

1st strategy:

Think of what everything shares. We have a word for that. Existence. Everything that exists, exists. With that one idea, you just made sense of everything. We do in fact have a word for everything. “Being.” Being is the one word, the one concept that embraces everything. That’s because everything is.

This strategy was Parmenides’.

Parmenides’ idea started it all. It’s not exaggerating to say that Parmenides’ great idea was inspirational. It inaugurated a civilizational project. Greek metaphysics, the study of being, started because he realized that “being” could be thought. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, medieval science (both Christian and Islamic), modern science, and our current technological civilization all are expressions of his hope. His hope is that the world really makes sense in way that we can put into our speech: it is hope that the world is intelligible, and able to be communicated to others. This hope is a hope that we have staked ourselves on– and so of course someone might fear if this hope turns out wrong. The hope is that the light of our language can shine on everything.

The identity between our thought of “being” and “being” itself is this light.

But to someone who sees words as only just words, this strategy feels cheap. All Parmenides is saying is a tautology. Whatever exists, exists. Whatever has being, has being. This is a tautology. What does “being” tell me? Nothing. Have the inheritors of Greek metaphysics given us a definitive account of what Being is or means? No.

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2nd Strategy of defending the Intelligibility Thesis:

If you want to speak meaningfully, you must make sense. Contradictions don’t make sense. You cannot attribute contradictory properties to the same object. If you do speak a contradiction, it is basically equivalent to if you said nothing– your words go from being More than Words (go from representing something about the real world) to just sounds. Because contradictions cant’t be made sense of, they both place limits on what should be said and on what can exist. Contradictions can’t exist and they shouldn’t be said. This shows a deep connection between how our words operate and how reality is.

This strategy was Aristotle’s. Another name for it is the Law of Non-Contradiction. Making explicit this law was certainly an achievement, as it is perhaps the second-most indubitable thing that philosophy has ever produced.

The Law of Non-Contradiction seems to show that the relationship between “no” and “yes’ in our speech seems to reflect something deep and fundamental about the way things are. We cannot intelligibly say “no” and “yes” about the same thing in the same way.

For example: I can say that the ceiling is not red and that the walls are red, but I cannot say that the walls are both red and are not red.

(If all you had was the concept of “house” and not “wall” or “ceiling,” it might appear that I am saying that the house is both red and that the house is not red–but once we make the distinction between walls and ceilings, we can understand we are not making a contradiction)

This helps further Parmenides’ hope: it inaugurated the metaphysical project of determining the ways things exist–making distinctions. Parmenides thought that all of Being was the same– Aristotle did not think so; he thought that there are distinctions within Being. It wasn’t too long until this project of distinction-making flourished in Islamic science, and later it also did so in western medieval metaphysics. Aristotle’s insight also heralded the Greek discovery/invention of logic.

But this still does not help the person who is stuck inside language. To someone who sees words as words, merely telling them that their words violate the law of non-contradiction would not force them to change anything about they act. They are truly stuck.

Notice that the Law of Non-Contradiction didn’t say that contradictions can’t be said. Merely that they shouldn’t. The person who is fine with words being just words can just decide to never follow this logical rule. They don’t care about their Words Being More Than Words. They are fine with their words being just sounds. In fact they want the other person to see their words as sounds. They are fine with speaking nonsense and contradictions. They are fine with other people speaking nonsense and contradictions. Nothing can force them to be logical– nothing can force them to obey the law of noncontradiction.

Being logical is referring to a specific stance: a stance that says don’t speak nonsense. Zen koans, for example, allege to be enlightening uses of contradiction. The Greek conception of light– the project of Greek metaphysics–had a certain agenda that excludes certain things– it’s not self-evidently universal.

The final strategy to defend the Intelligibility Theses was given right before Western metaphysics started to break down.

The strategy went like this:

Go ahead. Critique me. Tell me why things don’t make sense. Why words can’t make sense of the world. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed, you just used words to make sense of why they don’t make sense. And therefore you fail, as you proved my point, by making sense of them negatively–making sense of why they don’t make sense. And if you try to grunt and point at whatever it is that you claim can’t make sense, tell me what you are pointing at. You must be pointing at something….

This strategy was Hegel’s. If Parmenides’ strategy felt cheap, Hegel’s feels cheaper. Somehow, Hegel was able attach his name to the act of criticism, or in his technical terminology “determinate negation”– basically, saying no in a meaningful way. Because all criticism requires negating the other in a meaningful, determinate way, it appeared that there was no way to disprove Hegel. Because to disprove him was to prove him.

Think of it this way: both “yes” and “no” are words. If you want to disprove that words can’t make sense of everything, you have to use the word “no,” and you have to mean something with this no. But you your entire point is that there is something beyond words, and you just made sense of this thing (albeit negatively) with words.

It seems like the only way to get out of this is to say nothing.

As the analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, who tried to revive the Hegelian strategy in analytic philosophy, put this strategy:

Clearly human beings could dispense with all discourse, though only at the expense of having nothing to say.

This sort of Chinese-finger-trap quality to Hegel– where the more you push him the stronger he gets– one reason why philosophers in his time perceived Hegel as this oppressive monster that needed to be killed before philosophy could advance.

It’s from this Chinese finger-trap quality that Western philosophers– not just mystics– started to feel that they were stuck inside language.

Hegel’s viewpoint claimed to be, in what to its critics appeared to be immense hubris, the culmination of Parmenides’ dream. While Parmenides only said that the light of language can shine on everything in the most abstract sense: only the extremely abstract word “being” englobed the world–Hegel thought that he could shine the light on everything concretely, now all of language, as Science, englobes the world. In my interpretation of Hegel, Hegel most strongly committed himself to what I called the “Intelligibility Thesis” that I described above. He called thinking in this way capital-R Reason, (“Vernuft.”)

It is useful to compare Hegel’s Enlightenment Reason to the Islamic or Christian versions of the Intelligibility Thesis. God used to limit human language. Parmenides was right that everything was intelligible, everything was light, but only to God. To us, because we are limited and finite creatures, darkness clouds everything for us. Now, after God’s death, and after Hegel’s critique of Kant, nothing seemed to in principle be in the way of our sense-making abilities. Rational human language could possibly englobe the whole earth, make sense of everything. Hegel expressed this possibility.

Language, as Reason, could enlighten all spheres. He called the language conceived of in this way, in his grandiose terminology, The Concept.

To try to critique The Concept, the critics of Hegel posited the causal, political, historical, psychological, economical, forces that were “underneath” Language, which were the true causes of our speech. Language doesn’t exist to track reality and make it intelligible, but is instead an expression of this deeper, unintelligible thing, that distorts and limits language, as Reason, from englobing, enlightening and making sense of the world. This ranged from Shelling’s “Unground” (the ungrounded, contingent) to Schopenhauer’s blind Will, or Nietzsche’s Will to Power.

These three posits coalesced into the version that I think people find the most intuitive, one that people often think is true psychologically of themselves: Freud’s notion of the Unconscious. Freud implied that words never mean what they mean at face value, there’s always some hidden inner motive they express. Our body and our emotions betray our speech. We think we are being logical, but all we are is acting in ways that even ourselves don’t ever understand. We are always re-enacting issues from our childhood.

You should notice the implicit association of the Unground and Unconsciousness with darkness. These philosophers tried to show that there is something that deep and dark, something inherently unintelligible, on which thought and speech depends.

(Kōshō Uchiyama, in an introduction to Zen called “opening the hand of thought” that I am reading with a friend seemed to suggest that the concept jiko, which he translates as “whole or universal self,” performs a similar function, being that which is prior to thought and language. “Our whole self is the force or quality of life that enables conscious thought to arise, and it includes that personal, conscious self, but it also includes the force that functions beyond any conscious thought. The whole or universal self is the force that functions to make the heart continue beating and the lungs continue breathing, and it is also the source of what is referred to as the subconscious.”)

The Hegelian would retort, in his sly and tricky way, you are bringing these motives to light! You are making sense of these supposed “unintelligible” things! You are using words to make sense of what allegedly cannot make sense with words! The Hegelian uses his critics to try to englobe the world even more, to bring the deepest and most unintelligible parts of the world into his system, to give even more content to language, even more material for the Concept.

Once language has englobed the world, the norms that govern language are basically God. The neo-Hegelian philosopher of language, Robert Brandom, a student of Sellars, recently offered the strongest defense of this view in his reading of Hegel.

For Nietzsche’s retort, we only need to look at a phrase he said a century earlier: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

Shitposting, fucking things up, saying nonsense: these are the greatest acts of rebellion against our new God.

And so now, we have two sides, both of which see the other as stuck inside language, though in different ways. The Enlightenment side, whose protagonists range from Hegel to the “pro-science/ anti-postmodern” polemicists of our day, accuses the other of making words mean nothing anymore, of betraying logic, betraying the allegiance to the philosophical-scientific project started by Parmenides and Aristotle. They see the other side as being stuck inside language, because their language does not refer to any reality– they speak pure nonsense. The other, “postmodern” side whose protagonists are often both the far-left and far-right, accuses the other side of hubris, of thinking that our thought has no limits, that scientific intelligibility can be extended to everything, when they are in fact just people, using words. They accuse the other of being stuck inside their own narrow view of how to use language. Neither side can appeal to anything to convince the other, because they have different conceptions of what it would mean to use words to appeal to convince the other.

Let us return to my question:

Why do people care about this abstract conflict?

People care because they fear the dark.

The fear of the unknown is a primordial, biological fear, one is implicit in everyday life. Science is not an abstract project. The Hope That Things Make Sense, Parmendies’ Hope, is a hope we’ve built a civilization upon. Parmenides’ hope is expressed in many different ways: whether through how we assume things can be figured out in speech when we reach a problem, or in our trust in modern science, particularly medicine and technology. The postmodern claim that words are just words shows that the world they identify with is losing what justified it: people do not care about Truth, people do not care about being intelligible to other people, etc. The rejection of Parmenides’ hope in the light, in (Greco/Western, not Buddhist) Enlightenment, brings back a childhood Fear of The Dark. We fear when we couldn’t use words to make sense of and order the world. We fear the “Dark Age”– when, it seems, technology didn’t work, when our words didn’t map to physical forces that we could harness to make our lives better.

The people who are fine with messing things up, who use Nietzsche’s insights for their ends, would see it differently. Their conflict is implicit in everyday political struggles against words. There are many words that people want to (and should be) be freed from. A paradigm of these are words recently have been words that constitute gender and gender roles. If we are trapped within language, if language is only related to itself, and not to any underlying reality, we can tell a story of how the word means nothing besides its use: the word has come to be used to oppress us. These sorts of historical stories show how contingent everything is: nothing in the nature of things made it so women had to be the way they were. It was only a feature of how we used language. We can use the word differently, and we can be differently. This why the history of words can be liberating. By showing that we are stuck inside language, we show that language that has oppressed us is not related to reality. This means that we are not slaves to reality. We can make things different. Gender roles (and gender) can be different.

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The epitome of this conflict about intelligibility is captured most succinctly by two aphorisms of Hegel and Nietzsche, which parallel each other. They set up an analogous relationship between the Dark Abyss, and Enlightenment Reason

To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Whether you decide to be rational or not is up to you. But your choice will reflect back and affect you, yourself. If you choose to make yourself linguistically intelligible, subject to the Law of Non-contradiction, people will be able to use words to understand you. And you will be able to use words to understand the world. But if you don’t, if you don’t use words logically to justify yourself, then people will not understand you. You will become a void. Voids are very useful in defeating oppressive monsters, as the full context of the Nietzsche quote above suggests. He warns, that by becoming a void, you also pay a terrible price– you yourself may become a monster.

But what makes nothingness monstrous? Is it just because Parmenides (or Jesus) said so? Why set up an opposition between light and dark in this way, between Enlightenment Reason and the Monstrous Abyss?

This brings me back to where I started. Zen throws a wrench in the whole Greco-centric story. Probably like all other human cultures and religions, Buddhism has the same metaphor of light being Good, of “enlightenment.” But the Lotus Sutra shows that this is certainly not the Greek conception of Enlightenment, with its focus on words and their logical signification.

The Zen insight I opened this essay with seems to suggest me this: the insight that words are just words can be construed to be on the side of making things more intelligible, not less intelligible. Perhaps the (Mahayana interpretation of) the Buddha can serve as a second Parmenides, one less beholden to the Science of Logic– the thing that Greco-Enlightenment philosophy says we must be beholden to. I am just dipping my toes into Zen, and I don’t know enough about Buddhism to judge, but I do know what Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida said about nothingness and its place in Zen tradition, which always intrigues me. He said that Nothingness, (the opposite of Being, the Abyss) is the place beyond linguistic determination.

Perhaps we are not stuck within language after all. We may be able to let go of language.

Perhaps we appeared stuck because we started with the wrong idea: Being, rather than Nothing. Zen appears to me to provocatively suggest that we, meaning anyone who is an inheritor of Greek philosophy, might have seen the positive and negative space of the philosophical landscape inverted. What appeared bright, was actually dark– and what appeared dark, was actually light. Zazen, meditation– literally construed as not speaking– is perhaps more enlightening than speech.

That returns us to Wilfrid Sellars:

Clearly human beings could dispense with all discourse, though only at the expense of having nothing to say.

Perhaps the goal is to have nothing to say.

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You can easily wind up thinking that definitions are reality. The foundation of Buddhism, with its origins in India, refers to the reality of life prior to all definitions. Different Buddhist scriptures express this same fundamental reality in various ways: emptiness of reality, reality as it truly is, beyond logos, inexpressible tathata, true emptiness. Of course, since life produces all relative definitions, all definitions are life itself, but the reality of life cannot be bottled up in definitions of it. Although it produces all kinds of definitions, the reality of life transcends all definitions.

I use the expression “opening the hand of thought” to explain as graphically as possible the connection between human beings and the process of thinking. I am using “thinking” in a broad sense, including emotions, preferences, and all sense perceptions, as well as conceptual thoughts. Thinking means to be grasping or holding on to something with our brain’s conceptual “fist.” But if we open this fist, if we don’t conceive the thought, what is in our mental hand falls away. Our universal self, jiko, also includes that which lets go.