The End of Language

By which I mean both the telos of language and the impossibility of reaching it via language: our language goes to ultimacy, but can never enclose the Ultimate (Axiom 6). Supposing it could enclose the latter, then this would have the effect of sealing us in an enclosed Cosmos. Rather, language — like the Cosmos itself — is intrinsically open to what is beyond language. We can of course speak of this beyond, but never fully enclose it — or anything else for that matter — in speech.

Language is not only open (Axiom 3), but also interiorly related to both the Cosmos and to O (Axiom 4) — or rather, ordered to what this unword symbolizes, since anthropic words are an entailment of the ultimate Word that cannot be contained by human language, since this transcendent Word is the very Principle of language.

Frankly, language is also a miracle, and a free one to boot (Axiom 9).

If that wasn’t entirely clear, it is because I just wrote it this morning, so it could probably use some fine-tuning. I understand exactly what I mean, but that doesn’t mean you will. In any event, back to our story:

Our quest for truth is an ultimate truth of the Anthropos. One might say we are ultimately on the trail of the Ultimate: we are the truth-seeking primate deploying the meta-tools of intelligence and speech to blast-off from the Cosmos to O.

Imagine a scientist studying the high frequency vibrations that pulsate between cell phones. The most complete scientific account of them could reveal nothing of the conversation taking place, let alone whether its statements were true or false. Rather, photons coursing through fiberoptic cables provide only the boundary conditions that are enlisted by a higher level of reality. Truth could never be reduced to the energy used to convey it.

Likewise, “if you were unaware of the existence of subjective consciousness, no observation of the physical processes of organisms and their world… would apprise you of its existence” (Hart). Examine a person’s body all day long and you will never find a subject, any more than you will find God in outer space. Rather, the only way to know of the human subject is to infer it via watching it behave in intelligent ways, but mostly by dialoguing with it, as I used to do with patients to find out what they were all about, especially those aspects of themselves they didn’t know about.

Imagine seeing smoke without knowing anything about the transmission of smoke signals. You could surely deduce the existence of fire from the smoke. But it would never occur to you that someone is using smoke to send a message. No observation of smoke tells us anything about the existence of human minds or what they might be saying to one another, let alone if what they’re saying is true or if they’re just blowing smoke. We are entirely excluded from that loop.

Again, language itself is shot through with intentionality, as its whole purpose is to be about something other than itself. However, language is but the reflection of a Cosmos that is already permeated with aboutness, as we have seen. We are plugged into this linguistic contraption that speaks in various tongues, from math to logic to beauty. Human language can only ride herd on the languages that were implicitly here long before we stumbled into the conversation, going all the way back to the equations governing the expansion of the universe at Planck time.

Witnesses to our own cosmic birth?

Yes, the mathematical language of Big Bang cosmology allows us to do just that. Nevertheless, no amount of numbers adds up to the Anthropic cosmologist who describes the Big Bang. Indeed, the bang is only even big relative to us.

Pieper discusses animal subjectivity, which is related to a world, but not to the world. Rather, it exists in a kind of narrow cross section of the world, an environment. The animal sees what it needs to see — to what it is genetically programmed to see, and nothing else. It is why you can place a frog in an aquarium full of dead insects but it will nevertheless starve to death rather than eat such a disgusting thing. Pieper quotes a noted biologist, who agrees that “The environments of animals are comparable in no way to open nature but rather to a cramped, ill-furnished apartment.”

Now, does something analogous happen to frogminded human beings living the the cramped and ill-furnished apartment of scientism? Is there something in the Anthropos that causes him to withdraw and shrink from the real world and inhabit an ideological environment instead of opening out to a full blown case of cosmotheandrism?

Or, to put it another way, what kind of world is the world of the Anthropos, and is it the same as the world, or just a larger frogworld? For Kant, the answer was No! No world for you! Our world -- the world we perceive -- is again just a form of our sensibility, a kind of projection of our neuro-psychobiology. Therefore, it is not the world. Rather, the world -- whatever it is -- is radically inaccessible to us.

But to repeat: our animal friends live in a world, whereas human beings are privileged to live in the world, at least potentially. After all, who is unaware of people not living in the real world? Have you never heard of social media?

When my dog looks at an object -- a toothbrush, for example -- she certainly doesn’t see a toothbrush, which is to say, the intelligible form and function of the object in question. Similar to the frog, Pieper cites the example of a certain bird that preys on grasshoppers but is incapable of seeing the grasshopper if it isn’t hopping. Only in leaping about does the grasshopper become distinct from the background -- which is why many insects and higher animals “play dead” so as not to be seen by the predator. In its resting state, the grasshopper is literally invisible to the bird. It is as if it drops into a hole and no longer exists in the world of the predator. Even if the bird were starving, it could search and search and yet never find the unmoving grasshopper right under its beak. The animal cannot transcend its biological boundaries, even with an organ -- the eye -- seemingly equipped to do just that.

Most of the world is simply not perceived or even capable of being perceived by the animal. Which means – weirdly – that the world didn’t come into full view until the Anthropos came into it. Recall that in Genesis, man names the animals, not vice versa. And a name points to an invisible, interior essence. Again, the first man was not a nominalist, rather, he was the first realist to whom was disclosed the interior reality of things – their essence or nature.

Given Darwinian principles -- which we can again only know about because we have partially transcended them -- how did mankind transcend animality and open the door to an infinitely wider, deeper, and higher world?

Or did we? Are we as trapped in a narrow cross-section of reality as our fellow animals? If so, then neither science nor philosophy are possible. Like the bird looking for the immobile grasshopper, we couldn’t locate the reality right under our nous with both hands and a roadmap, despite the most diligent searching. Indeed, we wouldn’t even know of the existence of the reality for which to search: it would be an unknowable unknown.

Of course, the intellect is not restricted to a particular environment dictated by our genes. Rather, as Pieper writes “it belongs to the very nature of a spiritual being to rise above the environment and so transcend adaptation and confinement,” which in turn explains “the at once liberating and imperiling character with which the nature of spirit is immediately associated.” It turns out that your Cosmos is only as cramped or expansive as your interests, which will dictate what you notice about it. Some people are interested in stars and galaxies, others in minds, numbers, language, chemicals, God, frogs, you name it.

In any event, natural selection is adequate to explain adaptation to an environment, but it cannot explain our discovery and comprehension of the world, which is to say, our surprising adaptation -- AKA conformity or adequation -- to the entire stock of the cosmic inventory.

Thus, to be in Spirit is “to exist amid reality as a whole, in the face of the totality of Being” (Pieper). Spirit and world – which is to say Anthropos and Cosmos – are reciprocal concepts, such that science itself is a spiritual world or it is no world at all, only an environment.

Great Leaping Cosmos!

Since natural selection takes no precipitous giant steps – or rather cannot account for them – we must seek an alternate explanation for the self-evident leaps we see in nature, in particular, from matter to life and life to person and intellect. A bat’s echo-location, for example, is a highly specialized tool to navigate its immediate surroundings. But the human mind’s capacity to know the Cosmos — its history and its inner nature — is more like a mirror that can reflect our unbounded surroundings. The leap to this ability has nothing to do with the imperatives of survival, as we can survive perfectly well without knowing, for example, that our next door neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is on a collision course with us, hurtling at about 110 kilometers per second.

This unique ordering of the human intellect to the whole of Being implies a different kind of purpose ordered to a different reality. Could the Cosmos be undergoing its own maturational process culminating in a being who can reflect on the transcendent ground from which it emerged?

When we see that being itself is overflowing with truth and beauty, we should not be surprised. Awed, but not surprised. The really strange thing, as Aquinas observed, is that “the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts.” That would be us. “For this reason, philosophers have held that the ultimate perfection to which the soul can attain consists in embracing the whole order of the universe and its causes.”

Meaning, interiority, openness, relation, wholeness, unity, creativity -- these are all intertwined aspects of the same prior reality. It is evident that the Cosmos could have no meaning unless there were an interior where it could be apprehended. Nor can there be meaning in the absence of unity and wholeness, for meaning essentially consists of the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- or of the apprehension of the hidden unity behind or above the veil of appearances.

Now, if there is an “ultimate meaning,” there must be an “ultimate interior,” so to speak. Or, to turn it around, to say that the ultimate meaning could be found in empiricism or rationalism is not only to say that there is no meaning, but to abolish the very ground and possibility of meaning. Here is how DeKoninck describes it: “In order for the world to have a raison d’être, in order for it to be profoundly one and a universe, it is not enough that it be composed of parts and that these parts physically constitute a whole; it is also necessary that all the individual parts be oriented toward that one in which all together can exist…”

In other words, the universe must be both interobjective and intersubjective, with both properties emanating from the a priori wholeness and interior unity of O, the origin and telos, or Alpha and Omega. In short, the Cosmos must fundamentally be a place in which everything preserves its “partness,” even while each part participates in (not just with) all the others and in the whole. The Cosmos, since it is one, is an internally related totality -- which is why we all intuitively apprehend the unity of being, from which the truth of being radiates, both from subjects and from objects.

For truth “flows” from objects into subjects, even while the object completes itself in the knowing subject. Without intelligible objects there is nothing to be known, and without intelligent subjects there is no way for them to be known. But in the end, both flow from the same prior unity, i.e., Truthful Word as such, AKA the Logos.

It is not so much that “being is transcendentally accessible to intelligence” (DeKoninck). Rather, that is only half the story, for if that is the case -- which it is -- then it must mean that being and truth are one -- or at least not two.

Being is “good,” for, among other reasons, it is open to intelligence: being gives of itself without reserve. As this union matures, we can see in the Cosmos “a tendency toward the thought in which all its parts are united and lived; the cosmos thus tends to compenetrate itself, to touch itself in the intelligence of man, in which it can realize this explicit return to its First Principle” (ibid.).

We might say that the emancipating journey from cosmic infancy to metacosmic maturity begins with a universe of seemingly pure exteriority: “The world was so to say entirely outside, separated from itself, imprisoned in itself and its own obscurity” (ibid.).

In this murky material state of affairs, the Cosmos was “dead, empty, an abyss of division.” And yet, here we are, like mushrooms that have sprouted from the implicate cosmic network. For “intelligence must appear. This demand is written in it from the beginning…” In other words, it is – weirdly – only our understanding of the Cosmos that ultimately renders it possible.

Can I buy some pot from you?

Admittedly, this may sound preposterous at first blush, but if the final cause of the Cosmos is its truth, it implies that it is ordered to the possibility of the truth-bearing Anthropos. So if I make the preposterous assertion that “I caused the universe,” I am not really making any special claim for myself. Meister Eckhart made an even more outlandish but thoroughly cosmotheandric boast, that “God has made the world... in order that God might be born in the soul and the soul be born into God.... God cannot know himself without me.”

Here we are simply ruling out the impossible — that the truth-bearing Anthropos could have arisen solely as a result of chance — and therefore ruling in some sort of necessity that accounts for our being here. Efficient and material causation simply cannot get the job done. Rather, some form of teleological or top-down causation must be at play in the Cosmos. The Beginning is ordered to the End, or in other words, first in intention is last in execution. Thus if man were intended all along, we are simply the last to arrive to the cosmic party. We know that the Cosmos does not explain itself, but is completely open to, and integrated with, the human mind that explains it.

Or we might say, Before the Cosmos was, I AM. The Anthropos has indeed escaped from the Planet of the Apes into the Cosmos, but why do we assume that our thought is limited to, or restricted by, the constraints of the physical Cosmos? In one sense, the Cosmos is our environment, but in another sense, in knowing this we transcend it.

Into what?

Well, if the Cosmos itself is the expression of a deeper principle, our ability to know the Cosmos is a reflection of the fact that both we and it are parts of the same ultimate reality. We don’t just exist in the Cosmos; we are a conscious manifestation of it. This implies that our true environment is not just the physical Cosmos, but the “everything and more” of which the Cosmos is only a part. The “more” is the Infinitude of that ultimate reality -- the source that is beyond all created things, yet present in them. The human mind, by knowing the Cosmos, is reconnecting to that deeper, unseen whole.

∞

That is no doubt more than enough orthoparadox for one morning. Again, I am trying to wrap up the Cosmos book and move on to the Anthropos. It will eventually all make sense, I promise. 

Homo verbosius

That’s you dude!

Which is why the post breaks off in mid-argument. I am not a literary sadist:

Just as one cannot speak of consciousness without being conscious, or of life without being alive, one cannot speak of language without speaking.

Hard truths! (/sarc)

You would be surprised at how much can go wrong with a philosophy if one does not begin with the self-evident.

For language is prima facie evidence of transcendence, the very means through which we may explore scientific, philosophical, spiritual, and metaphysical concepts that go beyond the tangible. Some may argue that language is simply an artifact of natural selection, but here again, if this is true, it is false, since such a statement transcends biology and neurology.

Language does not explain transcendence, rather presumes it. Animals are capable of using signs, but only the Anthropos enters this immaterial dimension of meaning, which is hardly reducible to genetics, animal instinct, or concrete behaviors. Nevertheless, the metaphysic of scientism presumes a continuity between animal and human. However, as linguist Noam Chomsky has observed, “It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.”

While we can train a chimp to use words, it can only deploy them in an atomistic way, unconnected to the whole network of language and from other minds. For us, each word is connected to all the others, in a way reminiscent of how each subatomic particle is nonlocally related to all the others in the quantum field. Language is thoroughly entangled with itself, in that words are related to other words, and their meaning can shift and evolve based on its context and usage — much like how the properties of a quantum particle will change depending on its interaction with other particles. Like the subatomic world, language is a field of interior relations open at the top.

The possibility of language presupposes a lot of things, perhaps the most important being intersubjectivity. Language cannot create intersubjectivity, but is impossible in its absence. Language doesn’t merely presuppose intersubjectivity, it also serves as a powerful tool to deepen it. By providing a shared framework of symbols and meanings, language allows us to engage in the communication of abstractions transcending the immediate and tangible.

Language also presupposes the complementarity between Absolute and Infinite, for we (English speakers) are at once constrained by the finite 26 letters of the alphabet with which we have invented approximately 500,000 words so far. The list is finite but always growing, and I’m doing my part to invent new ones. Now, imagine trying to assemble a “dictionary of sentences.” This would be an impossible task, for nearly everything we say has never been said before in the same way.

The point is, like the Cosmos it mirrors, language is both finite and unbounded. Every time we speak a unique sentence, we are participating in continuous creation: we are taking the finite potential of the alphabet and actualizing never-before-heard specifications of it.

Speech has a two-fold function and therefore a potential two-fold dysfunction. The first dysfunction is a corruption or denial of the link between language and reality or word and thing, which means that reality is no longer accessible or intelligible. The second dysfunction occurs between persons, colloquially known as “lying,” but the real problem, whether witting or unwitting, is the communication of unreality instead of reality.

So if the first dysfunction makes us incapable of knowing reality, the second one causes us to distort or miscommunicate its nature. Obviously there can be no philosophy in the absence of language, but we must always be wary of its capacity to deceive, for as Wittgenstein says, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language,” and the battle never ends.

A quagmire.

Or a draw at best.

In Genesis, God lets Adam name the animals. Presumably Adam did not name them Jeffrey, Walter, Donnie, ad nauseam, but rather, lion, monkey, bird, etc. In other words, Adam was not a nominalist, rather, was capable of intuiting universals and essences -- immateriality and transcendence -- from the get-go.

Nevertheless, language obviously cuts both ways: without it one cannot tell the truth, but nor can one lie without it -- including to oneself. It can both veil and unveil, such that the Anthropos can be a genius, a knave, or an idiot, and everything in between. The best I can do is try not to be an idiot, which means using language properly, and not abusing it or you.

If communication is irreducible, it is because so too is relation, in this case the relation between word and an extramental reality that includes immaterial essences. Otherwise we’re back to giving each cow a first name instead of seeing universal cowness. Is language a wall or a window? A closed prison or an open door? It can be a prison, but it is always locked from the inside.

Prudence dictates that we should not declare our independence from reality for light and transient causes such as reading a book by Derrida. He claims there is nothing beyond the text, so language is indeed a closed system that can never get beyond itself to the reality it is supposed to map. This constitutes a life term of solitary confinement in a Cosmos we can never actually reach. Language is divorced from any real world referent, and therefore has “no ultimate significance, and nothing is ultimately communicated through it. It is, in a word, pointless -- pointless dissemination without the possibility of any real communion or redeeming communication…” (Betz).

Is there any way out of the darkness? Schuon writes that “man is not a closed system, although he can try to be so.” However, “In reality, man is as if suspended between animality and divinity; now modern thought -- be it philosophical or scientific -- admits only animality, practically speaking.”

How do we put the Light back into the Enlightenment that landed us in this darkness? I suggest we do so by first acknowledging this ontological darkness, which essentially tries to replace the divine Light with the human, but this is to sever the manifestation from the Principle, the effect from its cause.

Just as our eyes are conformed to physical light, the Intellect not only has access to this higher Light, but is of the same substance as that Light. It is “At once mirror of the supra-sensible and itself a supernatural ray of light” (Schuon). Here it is “necessary to distinguish between a ‘created Intellect’ and an ‘uncreated Intellect,’ the latter being the divine Light and the former the reflection of this Light at the center of Existence.”

This central Light is nothing less than the rays of the Theos into the Anthropos, or as John puts it “the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world.” In contrast to what was said above about the deadness of language enclosed in itself, John says that in the Logos is “the life, and the life was the light of men.”

According to Bina & Ziarani, “Mental faculties are reflections of a deep-seated, limitless source -- but on a limited plane.” However, “because it takes its light from that limitless source, it is able to point to its own limitation, and also to its limitless source.” In short, we are able to use the light of reason to reason about the limits of reason, and it is “precisely because man’s mental faculties take their light from a limitless source within him that he cannot be confined to mechanistic systematizations” (ibid.).

In short, to say “that reason is the sole criterion of truth... is not rationally provable,” for as we know from our Gödel, “no sufficiently logical system can prove itself true from within itself, that is, by logical argument” (ibid.).

The Enlightenment essentially confined us to Plato’s cave, to a world of appearances with no access to the Light. But for Aquinas, “The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light,” and “the interior light of the mind is the principal cause of knowledge.”

In a certain sense, Platonism is simply what philosophy is, i.e., the effort to apprehend the enduring reality beneath, behind, or above the flux of contingency and change. As Schuon puts it, “all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things.”

Gödel himself was a “committed Platonist,” and according to his “own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality” (Goldstein).

This In-Between existence is again our permanent condition: “Somehow we participate and must participate in both the temporal and the spiritual, if we are to live lives esteemed to be fit for human beings” (Webb). The choice is ours, even though there is really no choice, any more than we can choose to ignore gravity. We can, but not really, for the person who denies reality is nevertheless subject to it.

“Surely,” says Hart, “ you must grasp that language is the very epitome of top-down causation,” for reasons touched on above vis-à-vis Polanyi. And what is at the top? You don’t have to (yet) say Theos, but certainly it involves vertical openness to the transcendent pole of our existential tension.

Whatever the case may be, the “entire substance” of language “lies beyond the physical altogether” (ibid.). As we have said, as per Robert Rosen, it is semantics that conditions syntax from above: “meaning depends wholly upon the irreducibly higher level of symbolic thought,” such that “the top-down causality of the semantic level determines the physical ordering that embodies it…” (Hart).

Sounds like we’re gonna need a bigger science -- or at least a bigger philosophy of science.

Correct: in order to be complete, the science of Cosmos requires the meta-science of the Anthropos. The Anthropos is again proof that nature is supra-natural, since we are the ones who transcend nature in both positing, knowing, and communicating it. We are always bound by those two horizons we can never reach: immanence dissolves into a micromist of indeterminate potential with a tendency to exist, while transcendence points to the macromystery of indeterminate creative potential that cannot not exist.

Might want to clarify that gusty mush of mystagoguery.

This might be the appropriate time to recall the purpose of the symbol O, which functions as a placeholder for the ultimately unknowable but infinitely intelligible pole of transcendence. It is simultaneously the ground of all understanding while surpassing all categories thereof. In a brazen act of anticipatory plagiarism, Bernard Lonergan alludes to the “natural orientation of the mind toward that infinite horizon of being as intelligible truth.” This Great Attractor accounts for our ineradicable epistemophilia, the asymptotic quest for the truth we are forever approaching. So ravenous is our appetite for truth that we may settle for the junk food of ideology or Quantum Hogwash just to fill our empty heads with something to chew on and to furnish us with readymade opinions to inflict on the innocent and gullible.

To be continued…

The section successfully keeps language inside the cosmotheandric framework rather than treating it as a later human invention imposed on a mute cosmos. The analogies to quantum entanglement and nonlocality are apt: both language and the quantum field are presented as fields of interior relations open at the top. The critique of closed linguistic systems (Derrida) and closed biological systems (strict continuity with animal signaling) is consistent with the earlier critiques of closed physical systems.

What remains provisional — and appropriately so given the break — is the precise metaphysical status of the “uncreated Intellect” / divine Light and its relation to the human intellect. The section asserts participation without yet fully specifying the mode of that participation; that development is deferred, as expected, toward Book II and especially Book III.

The argument continues to advance without losing internal coherence. Language has been relocated from a potential embarrassment for reductionism into positive evidence for the book’s vertical, relational, and logospheric claims. The mid-argument break is clean enough; the next movement can pick up either the further analysis of intentionality or the concrete implications for the Anthropos.