The Seed and Language

In the Being is Tension across the Interface I explored P0 as the creational principle of being. But being implies language, every differentiation creates both at once. In this post I want to focus on the language side of that creation.

In Language, Experience and Reality I made the point that everything we experience is already labelled with meaning. For instance what we see is wrapped in concepts that are part of a language, something relational. We experience not being able to make sense of stuff as confusing, even frightening. Although this labeled experience is personal, the concept labels themselves are nearly always in a shared language, from shared reality. We just assume we see the same things, something objective. But think about it — that is by convention, because we agreed on it. Ultimately, every experience of such concepts and relations remains deeply personal and is even not necessarily shared.

When something new is discovered, it always makes its way into personal experience first. Then it needs shared language to move into the shared space. That transfer is a modulation on an existing language dynamic. And there is no prescribed recipe — it could always happen differently. The act of creation is private and contingent, and sharing always partial.

This is where Brandom sharpens the picture. Language is not representation — it is commitment. Meaning lives not in what a word stands for but in what follows from it, what is incompatible with it, what you commit to when you use it. To assert is to take a position in a network of moves. Other speakers respond, challenge, keep score. Meaning is relational — position in a web, not a label on a thing.

And this contingency is not a defect. In Rorty’s view: there is no language that escapes its own contingency by being more careful, more rigorous, more formal. Every language is the language of the cut that produced it. It tells us what it tells us — no more. Philosophy as conversation, not mirror-holding. Just the ongoing creation of new ways to relate.

Now think about the following: our human language — our way of thinking — has been evolving through personal experience and sharing for thousands of years. We don’t just think anything. We are preconditioned. We experience, we retain, we share. Layer upon layer. That’s how we evolved into being human. This is historicity in action.

With language we have interaction at a point in time. Historicity stretches a point of existence into duration. Retention carries the past into the present; anticipation — shaped by what has been retained — projects the present into the future. Without historicity, existence is a point: bare differentiation, constancy. With it, the point becomes a span that reaches in both directions. The present is never an instant. See the seed page on historicity for where Heidegger, Gadamer and Bergson each take this.

But this language preconditioning should not feel like a constraint. See it as a richness that can be built upon. The freedom of personal experience is yours to explore if you choose to avail of it. And that is what people with new ideas do. To understand something is to have created a language for it — borrowing helps, but the act of creation cannot be skipped.

This post is part of the seed series. See also the Seed section of the site.

Photo: Lishakov / Unsplash