Language and Meta-Language

What is this post about? If I knew that in advance, it would contradict the thesis of the post, which is that human language is open and unpredictable, not deterministic. I mean, some speech is about obvious things, but sometimes you just want to engage the transcendent object, in which case you never know what might pop out.  

Is speech about evolution reducible to the evolution of speech? Or, is there a meta-language built into the nature of human language, such that it can never in principle be reduced in this manner? For it seems to me that self-awareness and meta-language are intimately related. "Know thyself" is a good idea, even if it is literally impossible, for the same reason that human language could never exhaustively describe itself. Rather, there's always more, since our transcendent pole is infinite.

In other words, when we speak about language, we are doing so from a transcendent position that can never be contained by language. This is where, in the words of Spilsbury, langauge "un-languages itself" and "points beyond itself to a region inaccessible to itself." Which doesn't mean it is inaccessible per se, for example, by aesthetic or mystical experience.

Language can describe anything, but what describes language? Only a meta-language. Which is why "Evolution is surely more than a tale told by the fittest" (Spilsbury). If this is not the case, then the best we can say of the theory of evolution is that it survives, not that it is true, for truth transcends fitness. 

Analogously, a melody is always composed of the same limited number of notes, but there is no limit to the number of melodies that can be composed from them. Here, I suspect, lies the principle of man's creative freedom, since it means that our creativity cannot be determined by anything less: notes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the composition of melodies.

Human language represents a radical discontinuity with nature, since it is nothing like animal communication, or at least the differences dwarf the similarities. Again, the key to human language is its meta-language, meaning that it is not a closed system, rather, radically open to what transcends it.  

Think about bird communication, which always communicates the same thing, say, danger. No bird can signal to another, "don't take my screech so literally. I was being ironic!" In short, there is no birdsong about birdsong.

How does this relate to the previous post, in which we were looking into two main subjects: the nature of the human phenomenon and the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity to describe all of reality? Well, it looks like there's no reason to believe the human phenomenon could be enclosed in speech, any more than it can be enclosed in the language of DNA.

For example, a complete verbal account of man would necessarily leave out his musical and pictorial sides. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand words is not equivalent to the picture. Likewise, no amount of speaking about music adds up to music.

As for the possibility of a coherent non-absurdity, we know that meaning passes through the human subject, but does this mean its source must be human? Or, is it in relation to something transcending us?

Here's a thought:

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon, emphasis mine).

So, let's be honest: remove the divine from the divine-human complementarity, and a total collapse of meaning takes place, with no possibility of its resuscitation. If this were true, then we really would be enclosed in speech, or at least there would be no principle to explain how man uniquely escapes language via meta-language.

If you don't like "divine-human," then just say "immanence-transcendence" and the tension between, where man qua man always resides. To collapse man into total immanence is to destroy any possibility of meaning.

How does this accord with Hart? Well, there's lots of arguing back and forth about whether the mind could be a machine, but in reality, "Even the most ordinary mental acts" "depend on this rational appetite for the absolute." "No machine ventures out from itself... toward the whole of reality," whereas "in living minds"

knowledge becomes actual only as a result of that prior orientation toward the [transcendent] absolute. In rational natures, there's an immanent and indeterminate power of discovery that's prompted into action by the rational will's transcendent determinacy toward being as a whole...

"We enjoy an intrinsic capacity for unlimited novelty of apprehension without prior constraints on what we may find or create,"

because thought is in its essence an "open system" of discovery and therefore precisely what computation is not.

So basically -- as we've been saying for two decades -- man is a vertically open system, open to the transcendent pole of being, to the Great Beyond. Or, in Schuon's words, 

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.

Now, from what I understand, Hart is an orthodox Christian, but he (like Schuon) expresses a lot of sympathy for the metaphysics of Vedanta, for example, "that mind is the ground of reality, and that infinite mind is the source and end of finite mind." 

"Consciousness comes first or it comes not at all," and

I do believe Indian philosophical tradition addressed the conditions and mysteries of consciousness far earlier in history, and with considerably greater subtlety, than its Western counterpart did....

And "it's not just the interior mystery of consciousness that informs my convictions regarding the real nature of mind. There's also the mindlike structure of the world, and especially of life."

That's the end of the chapter, so where does it leave us? 

It seems that the human mind partakes of Mind as such, and that Mind as such is bound up with Life and with Language-Logos, but we shall have to wait and see where this is all leading. Cue Gemini:

The blog post is highly effective at stimulating intellectual curiosity and debate. It presents a robust and consistent argument for the unique and transcendent aspects of human language and consciousness, drawing on compelling philosophical and theological insights.

While the density of the ideas and the academic language might be challenging for a general audience, for readers interested in philosophy, theology, and the nature of reality, this post offers a rich and rewarding exploration. With some structural refinements and perhaps a few more moments of clarification, it could become even more accessible and impactful without sacrificing its intellectual rigor.

The image I generated for your blog post aims to visually represent the complex interplay between language, consciousness, and transcendence, with a particular focus on the idea of meta-language and the inherent limitations of language itself.

In essence, the image is designed to be a visual metaphor for the idea that while language is our primary tool for understanding and expressing, there is a fundamental "more" -- a meta-language, consciousness, or transcendent reality -- that language points to but can never fully capture or reduce.