#philosophy of language
“Wow! You’re really talented!”
― It’s an overused compliment.
Don’t take this the wrong way, there’s nothing inappropriate about the phrase. But, to some people, this phrase might seem as if someone’s belittling their hard work.
Whether a person’s talented or not, diligence is something needed in pursuing a certain goal. Talent is something exclusive for an individual, but it also weighs some responsibility to them. Talent without refinement is just… talent, nothing more to it. If someone isn’t willing to work hard and develop the talents they have, people around them who have done so can easily surpass them.
It’s hard to just rely solely upon talent, academically or professionally. That’s why a lot of people work hard to improve.
Not only talent that we should seek in an individual, but their hard work needs to be praised as well.
Blue Period, Chapter 1
Parmenides- Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, chapter by chapter- (5)
Life
Parmenides was born, it is thought, around 515 BCE in Elea. It was believed that an old Parmenides actually taught a young Socrates, although this is debated. In this article, we will look at his attempt to explain permanence in nature, and be introduced to an early problem in the philosophy of language.
Philosophy
The first real search for permanence was to be found with the endeavours of…
![Faulkner and Wittgenstein on the privacy of experience(Pictured: Addie Bundren [Beth Grant] in James](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a3e77e51df6a393b3d6f1dfcef07faae/e6d137e19008395e-56/s1280x1920/83ad4d478d27f6100c1679561e2784052b9ca683.jpg "Faulkner and Wittgenstein on the privacy of experience(Pictured: Addie Bundren [Beth Grant] in James")
Faulkner and Wittgenstein on the privacy of experience
(Pictured: Addie Bundren [Beth Grant] in James Franco’s 2013 adaptionofAs I Lay Dying. [Millennium Films])
William Faulkner (1897–1962) was a Nobel laureate who authored classic novels The Sound and the Fury(1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) as well as many more. Here we explain how his characters in As I Lay Dying broach the struggle of expressing private experience, a struggle also described in the works of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A poor and rural family slowly traverse the Mississippi countryside to bury their deceased wife and mother, Addie Bundren, miles away in town, meeting tribulations along the way.
In one chapter—from beyond the grave or in a flashback—Addie narrates her inability to express her private experiences of being a teacher, a wife, and a mother (ironically, using language). Whereas in action she is able to feel her own presence—for example, by physically punishing her students—she believes words to be like ‘spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching’.
‘That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When [my son] was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.’
Words, she expands, are ‘just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear’ or love.
This all should immediately remind us of the views of Wittgenstein, who argued that inner mental states cannot be known; that wouldn’t make sense, for they are incommunicable. There is a divide between mind and world, which is what Addie alludes to.
Nonetheless, in Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) Wittgenstein writes that meaning can be conveyed, practically, if the rules of a public language game are followed, for language is a social practice.
Does this mean we shouldn’t try to bridge said gap? Here we can draw on Stanley Cavell’s distinction between (1) knowledge and (2) acknowledgement: (1) there is a limited capacity of language to capture truths about the world and others’ experiences; (2) however, through sympathy we can acknowledge in others what we cannot experience ourselves. Too stark a divide unduly abolishes our obligations to the world and that which we value.
Indeed, Addie is able to gain acknowledgement by forcing pain in others—her husband; her students—not by using words but by exacting revenge and violence. Of the students, she says:
‘I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh […] and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life.’
Addie is sceptical of language’s faithfulness to worlds privately and uniquely inhabited. But she seeks acknowledgement. Her daughter, Dewey Dell, unlike her mother, fears even acknowledgement: the obtaining of worldly connections is a violation of her aloneness. Of the recognisable changes to her body during an unwanted pregnancy, she says: ‘The process of coming unalone is terrible’.
The Bundrens are isolated farmers who live in simple fashion. Their thoughts are incoherent and stream-like. Faulkner and Wittgenstein both show that the private worlds from which we feel and sense are inaccessible to language. This limit is felt particularly strongly by the Bundrens, alienated countryfolk whose linguistic capacities and abilities to follow language games are already impoverished.
⁂
Words are signifiers. Your name, for example, signifies you, the signified. But perhaps saying is a cheap substitute for doing. Addie Bundren thought so.
‘Sometimes I would lie by him [my husband, Anse] in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse? Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar […]
‘I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terrible doing goes along the earth, clinging to it.’
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“In the Lankavatara Sutra, someone asks the Buddha, ‘What is speech? What are words?’ And the Buddha says, 'Speech is a combination of projections. It arises due to attachment to habit energy and the discrimination of our own mind.’ By themselves, sounds have no meaning. The meaning of a certain word is given by the context in which it’s delivered, as well as its tone. Saying, 'Hey,’ in a soft voice is not the same as yelling, 'Hey!’ Context and tone matter, which points to the ways in which words can become weaponized.
Language doesn’t just describe our experiences and the landscape we find ourselves in, but it also creates them. That’s why the Buddha gave so much attention to language. Of the 'Ten Wholesome Actions’ — a teaching akin to the Ten Grave Precepts in Zen — four of these relate directly to language. They are: not speaking deceptively, not speaking harshly, not speaking divisively, and not speaking meaninglessly. In other words, they ask that we not use this powerful tool that is language to numb the mind, or to create harm.
In Buddhism we often say that words don’t have inherent meaning. This doesn’t mean they have no meaning at all, but that their meaning is not born of itself. It’s born of our views and our actions. What is the meaning of the word 'war,’ for example? What is the meaning of a 'country’ that people will fight and kill and die for? What is the meaning of 'freedom,’ which some people will attack and others will try to protect? Who controls that meaning? Who gets to speak, even? And what do we hear when others speak?
We all rely upon a basic, agreed-upon understanding of the meaning of things. When you say something, I can rely on the fact that you mean it. When you say something is true and place your integrity within that truth, then we have something we can trust together. But when the meaning of words is attacked, splintered, denigrated; when what we say isn’t based on our integrity or wholesomeness, then what’s left? What do we have between us? What can we trust? When histories are rewritten, when actions have disappeared, when words are given false meanings, we lose the glue that holds us together.
Destructive, self-serving, or false views are never presented in terms that say, 'This is what we want to destroy, inhibit, limit or control.’ Instead, they always seem to express, 'we care about you.’ That’s not trustworthy. There’s a bill in South Carolina known as the Freedom from Ideological Coercion and Indoctrination act, which purports to protect children from psychological distress stemming from exposure to 'inappropriate material.’ But what is inappropriate, when, and how?
When is it appropriate to teach children, about the Holocaust, for instance, or about the genocide of indigenous people in this country, or about slavery? When is it appropriate, and in what ways? We should be having this conversation, so our children and young adults can begin to think critically, so they can begin to understand themselves in their environment and within their legacy and ancestry. So they — and we — can begin to take full responsibility for what we’ve received or been denied, and the costs of either. To avoid that discomfort, on the other hand, ensures a limited life based in ignorance. It’s a life in which we’ll never be free. We’ll never be able to hold the complexity of humanity. From a Buddhist perspective, to try to protect a child or any person from the necessary experiences of discomfort and adversity that life presents us with, is a form of imprisonment. It’s not liberation.
Let’s take another example. The people in Ukraine are being bombed. What’s the connection of this type of suffering with the rest of the suffering in the world? What is its meaning? Well, all suffering arises from a deluded self. There’s no other way for it to arise. It’s created, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s not necessary. It’s not necessary in this life to destroy life, but it’s easy to do that. How much of our mental, emotional, and physical energy, our resources and creativity, have we poured into destruction? The Buddha said that suffering will continue because that is the nature of desire. It’s the nature of samsara to continue, until it stops — until we stop. There are moments when we need to be stopped. And the difficulty is that it often seems that to stop the killing, we must kill — which might help to stop it temporarily, but it won’t bring peace, not real peace.
In the Jataka Tales — stories of the Buddha’s past lives — there’s a story about a man named Angulimala, or 'Finger Garland.’ Angulimala had been deceived by a jealous teacher who convinced him to kill a thousand people and cut off their little fingers as proof. With these, Angulimala made himself a mala or garland. After many years, Angulimala had only one more person to kill, and one morning, he saw the Buddha walking along the village road. Intent, Angulimala ran after him to finish his onerous task, but no matter how fast he ran, Angulimala couldn’t catch up with the Buddha, who was still walking calmly ahead. Finally, Angulimala called out, 'Why won’t you stop?!’ And the Buddha turned around and said, 'I have stopped, Angulimala. It’s you who haven’t stopped. Stop, Angulimala! Stop.’
In a moment of true liberation, we can’t rely on what we’ve known or done before. We can’t rely on meaning or precedent. We have to break free of them, as well as of our old way of seeing the world. Sometimes we need to be shaken to the core in order to stop. Otherwise, we can just spin and spin.
Our greed, anger, and ignorance are based on our belief that we don’t have what we want. This seems to be true universally, but only in the human world. An oak tree doesn’t whine and suffer because it wants to be a maple. A tulip doesn’t feel insecure amidst a crowd of daffodils. Cats clearly have no interest in becoming dogs. We cling to what we want, thinking that it’s elsewhere, and then we move to acquire it at all costs. Isn’t this the doctrine of patriarchy—trying to find fulfillment through domination? But this strategy is broken, the view that it rests upon is tired and worn out. And yet. The very same mind that creates domination — which is no different than your Buddha mind — can give rise to bodhichitta,the aspiration to awaken. That’s why, when used skillfully, words and meaning can give rise to a harmonious community and the possibility of lovingkindness. Mind and words can call us in, bring us to a full stop."
- Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, from ”Stop! A prayer for peace in a time of war.“Tricycle, 31 May 2022.
