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.
