People Are Phrases
When you have names and forms,
know that they are provisional.
When you have institutions,
know where their functions should end.
Knowing when to stop,
you can avoid any danger.
All things end in the Tao
as rivers flow into the sea.
—from Chapter 32, Tao te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”— Wittgenstein
Some years ago, a well-meaning student had the above Wittgenstein quotation handsomely framed, and gave it to her teachers as an expression of gratitude. I remember thinking—there are two ways of taking that potent quotable. The student seemed to read it as praise for the power of education, of reading widely, enhancing one’s vocabulary, broadening, as bureaucrats say, one’s horizons—all good things—and perhaps that implication is present in the thought, but I read it another way: we are blocked from perceiving what we can’t name. In fact, perceiving and naming are basically the same thing. We have delineated something from the infinitude of potential and forced it to be an entity, a phenomenon. Something with a name.
Aristotle was interested in the world around him. Very interested. He developed a logic-based way of approaching phenomena of nature and culture. He inherited the impulse from Plato and the other intellectual currents around him. This way of looking closely and systematically at our world has influenced human thought for 2000-plus years, and ultimately helped lay the foundations for the scientific method. They say he knew everything knowable in his time (384-322 BC)—an exaggeration, of course, but whoever they are, they have a point. He covered a lot of ground. He thought like a scientist: divide things into parts, examine their source, their function, their effects, consider how they interconnect, observe them without bias, classify them—i.e. name them—i.e.—see them.
I’m thinking mainly of genus/species. Over two thousand years later Linnaeus formalized this way of seeing. He’s rightly honored for it—it’s a key block in the foundation of how science works. Science tries to get reality to hold still in order to understand it. But getting reality to stand still, in discrete units, changes the nature of it—if we look only at each frame of a film, we don’t see the film. Or like looking at a plat map, then flying above the area in an airplane. Oddly enough, the names aren’t there.
We think the basic unit of language is the word, but I would say it’s the phrase—or rather (since I don’t mean anything technical by “phrase,” which can be a single word—and would be if there were a single word for the sensation of watching the last light of the day illuminate gaps in the western trees as you caress an indefatigable regret), a pulse of meaning, where words, which are only fanciful inventions that make language classifiable, and can only mean what individual interpreters say they do, melt into the indivisible idiom of the whole.
Words don’t exist until there’s something that needs a name. Conversely, a word that stands for something you don’t know makes you feel there must be a something, which is fine for things you can go out and see for yourself, but calls for some skepticism with abstractions. Most people think intelligence means knowing the names of things, when it is actually identifying what the things are that need names.
The scientific way of seeing things prioritizes entities, the individual. And those entities go into classes, categories. The same is true for words—single things, holding still for books and dictionaries, as though there weren’t, as with all things, other currents passing through and around them—tones and colors and connectivities that transcend units. Seeing “things” is necessary, but we need to remember, naming things occludes the possibility of other “things” in that space. Once you decide these are the things you can see, it’s almost impossible to see other things. I remember confusing a friend in a discussion once with my hard to classify political views. I could feel him groping for some kind of handle—until finally I gave him some key word or phrase he was looking for and his face transformed. “Oh,” he said, “you’re one of those.” He had his category. In that moment all communication died.
Words are indeed individual stand-alone things—but when we hear, or read, language we don’t hear words, we hear meaning. Words can be catalogued and shelved—until they are in the company of other words. Then, like the new vision of forest trees Suzanne Simard gave us, they send out tentacles to all the other words—they vibrate with myriad other currents and create a unique pulse of meaning that transcends the sum of all the individual “meanings” of the words.
In Lao Tzu’s vision, the infinite potential of the Tao cannot be named. Naming reduces, limits. It tries to bring the incomprehensible onto the plane of the humanly comprehensible. Only the entities that rise out of the Tao into temporary form have names. An entity implies a desire for self-awareness, which requires a form. A me. In the “Great Mother” of the Tao there are no me’s. Why is it that the only way you can do something well is by disappearing into it? Why is it that you figure things out when you stop thinking about them? Why am I most myself when I’m not myself at all?
You can think of people as words. But this condemns them to individuality at the expense of the mycelium that connects them to everything else.
I’m growing old and losing my language. All that’s left is the mystery of, and the yearning for, whatever comes after language. A state of mind where we are not locked in the anxiety of expectation.
Something is not real until it doesn’t have a name.
August 19, 2024