Campfire

When reading through the six lines of the SPLectrum seed there are two foundational heavyweights that stand out.
P0 — Being implies language
makes language universal, well beyond linguistics or the human use of it.
P2 — Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality
puts the ownership of reality at the grassroots level, generated by all that is. Reality is not imposed. In this post I want to explore the powerful trio of language, experience and reality through what I hope is an evoking example.

The domestication of fire has been an important step in human evolution which impacted many aspects of daily life. It brought the magical side of fire into the community and became part of so many rituals. Fire as magic that can kindle a deeper experience of reality is perfect to illustrate the intertwining of language, experience and reality.

Looking at the flames of an open fire, we don’t see undefined things. Everything we see is invisibly labelled as something known, to a certain extent understood. A flame, a log, sparks and smoke. This whole vocabulary is present just by looking. The light entering our eyes is processed in so many different ways, categorised, the labelling stashed away as knowledge to be applied each time such objects come into view. It is language as a way of life, language expressing how we experience the world.

But there is more than sight. There is the heat of the fire on our skin, the sound of burning. Our body absorbs the presence of fire through all its sensory channels, each channel processing input, assigning vocabulary. A dynamic game, a spectacle speaking to us through its presence while we speak back to it using our inner language that we associate with it. It is a language that is strictly personal — the way I experience fire may use a vocabulary common to others, but the inner sound of it is personal, only experienced by me in that specific way.

This insight was developed within the continental tradition under phenomenology and aptly characterised by three major philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Husserl fired the first shot: stop theorising about experience and examine what actually appears — the structures of experience as they are.

Heidegger, who was his student, made it more intense. We don’t observe the fire from a distance — we’re in the warmth, in the sound, in the light. Being in the world, experience very much from within, not looking at it. Engagement before reflection. By the time we think fire, we’re already deep into living it.

Merleau-Ponty grounded it deeper into the body with an approach that was ahead of his time. The body absorbs, structures, knows before any word arrives. The hand that shields the face from the heat doesn’t wait for a thought. Decades before neuroscience confirmed it, he described how the body processes and understands the world without needing conscious thought to guide it.

But when philosophy tried to integrate what is personal experience, the outside view got in the way. If shared reality is something that can be seen from outside, then personal experience becomes a defective personal attempt at describing that reality. The “real” reality is out there; your experience is just your imperfect take on it. From that position, what is personal and can’t be objectified becomes an embarrassment — labelled ‘inaccessible’ and set aside.

However, this personal experience is my reality — how I experience reality. That is different from our reality — what we agree on, the shared part of our personal experiences. Philosophy traditionally addresses personal experience through the concept of qualia, personal experience inaccessible to others. I find the use of the word ‘inaccessible’ clumsy. Inaccessible is different from not shared. There is no imposed limit on what can be shared or not.

Flip the picture and personal experience isn’t defective — it’s primary. Shared reality is the overlap, the convergence, the part we manage to align through language exchange. The personal isn’t a failed attempt at the objective. The objective is the shared part of the personal, the subjective. The practical limits are in the language we use to experience and share. Language shapes thinking, language shapes experience, language shapes the shared reality.

This post is part of the reality series. See also the Reality section of the site.

Photo: Hans Photo / Unsplash