From a Linguistic perspective, we are talking all around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and ideas around linguistic relativity. Does language influence our perception of reality or do we perceive reality and then reconstruct it using language?
From there, we could easily jump to the world-as-simulation concept... we do not experience reality. We collect sensory input via several receivers (eyes, ears, nose, fingertips) and assimilate those data into our own subjective construction of reality in real time using secret mechanisms in the human brain - how many of them conscious or subconscious, I really couldn't say. There is a name for this but I forget it now. The technical work done in Numenta Labs might lend a clue.
In other news, there isn't an earthly possession of mine I wouldn't happily hand over to witness a conversation between Borges and Cormac McCarthy...
Certainly, the “Blow-up” story might be a good place to start. My memory of reading this after seeing the movie was that you still have to read closely and carefully to catch that a murder has occurred.
Thinking about this movie and story recently reminded me of the “hybrid” nature of our art forms now, the internationalized aspect. Argentinian writer living in France —> famous Italian director —> changes setting from Paris to swinging London (let’s face it, cooler than Paris in 1966) —> adds American detective genre elements.
Well... Final del Juego has one of my favorite stories in it (which Henrik just unearthed... La Continuidad de Los Parques). And Rayuela is a bit of a mind fuck just as a novel.
Yeah, linguistic relativity is the question. I'm very partial to the idea.
"there isn't an earthly possession of mine I wouldn't happily hand over to witness a conversation between Borges and Cormac McCarthy..."
Well said. One of the reasons I got all worked up and I had to write this was because of the intellectual overlap I was noticing between the ideas in Cormac's novels and the ideas in Borges's stories, even though they are very different artists.
I had just read Henrik Karlsson's "Being patient with problems" before reading this and it was brought to my mind, not just because of the unconsciousness' power theme, but also for the citation of The Kid whose depthness recalled the Grothendieck quoted in Henrik's piece. Since he was credited at the end I suppose that for you it would be superfluous, but perhaps to the benefit of other readers:
Zen koans had come to my mind reading this piece before they were referred to explicitly. Nonetheless, the likened to koan Democritus quote seemed to me, well, rather static. At least when I think of koans, I think of those associated with Joshu. It's hard to get a "good example," so I'd just flip the book in random and pull a short one:
A monk asked, “The style of the master—what is it?”
Joshu said, “I don't hear well. You must speak up.”
The monk repeated his question.
Joshu said, “By your asking about my style, I know your style.”
(Radical Zen, The Sayings of Joshu, translated with a commentary by Yoel Hoffmann)
These are famously opaque, to the point that some people feel that any obscure bit of dialog would similarly qualify as a koan. It might be in some way true, but it misses the koans' documentary aspect. What makes them obscure is their —to borrow terms from your text above— non-stasis, their fluidity. Their meaning, that is, the meaning, or shall I say significance, of the exchanged words is derived from the context of the exchange, which is indeed missing. I interpret most as an effort of upmanship by the students against their master, Joshu, seeking to make him say something to which they could respond with "Aha! Got you." Therefore my effort of fathoming these koans rests not so much on the figuring out what particular words —nouns, verbs— signify, such as "style" above, but in figuring out who the persons are, what the situation is, what their assumptions are and so on.
I very much liked the bits about Heisenberg's arrival at the Uncertainty Principle!
"If you actually try to reason about identity, or even the ontology of simple objects, you find yourself twisted up in all sorts of logical paradoxes. Here too, reality refuses to be grasped."
I'm not sure whether here —and in the preceding and following paragraphs— you expound on Michael Stevens or express your own thoughts. It seems to contradict/ be contradicted by other sections of the text, and either way I rather disagree about this point, though it depends on what you mean above by "reason" (communicating, thinking, knowing?). I agree that concepts are useful but not exactly real, but what is real? I'm not sure anyone gets twisted thinking about one's —or Theseus' Ship's— identity. Paradoxes lay bare the limits of logic, that is, of language, not so much of thinking. Any sentence or lingual utterance casts a phenomenon into a limited conceptual framework, and the paradox does it in a way that frustrates the mind. But a thing is not another thing. The map is not the territory. A goat is not a pebble. You can count, divide, distribute goats using pebbles, but a goat is not hard, cannot skip on lakes and does not fit in your pocket (had you had any pockets, Mr. Caveman). The identity of a person or a ship is not bound to the particular atoms that compromise it (it seems to be a metaphor; a chair is the material formed into a chair form, material consists of atoms, therefore the atoms are the chair). It's a false presumption that the articulation of the paradox leads one to assume, a kind of an anchoring (ha) effect. Language —and paradoxes and other detached, non-contextualized fragments thereof in particular— have an air of expressing an absolute truth, perhaps indeed lay claim to it, but of course —as your essay expresses— they cannot do it. They only reflect an aspect of the real, like the pebbles that can capture the number or the spatial relationship of goats but not many other aspects of goats. Like with the koans, thinking beyond the words, contextualizing in, helps to clarify them. Who is asking about the identity of the ship? My friend who tries to give me a hard time? The insurance company? The taxman? An easier one is Zeno's. They say that Achilles must run half the distance first, but nobody in his right mind doubt that he will reach the tortoise.
Thanks for reading Mark, and thanks for sharing Henrik's post. It's great and I hope people read it, and another thing that makes it particularly interesting is that Grothendieck and this way of problem solving is actually discussed quite a bit in Stella Maris!
You are probably right that the comparison to Koans there is a little bit of a stretch. What I meant was mostly that Heraclitus's philosophy only survives in fragments that give it a Koan-like feel, and they also have the initial appearance of absurdity like the most famous Koans. Anyways, love your commentary on the Koans here, and it helps support the point that the power of language is in its fluidity, not the way it maps reality.
Your challenge is fair. I am mostly summarizing Michael Stevens but I happen to agree with the thinking. To be honest, I don't see how it contradicts the rest of the text, although I acknowledge I am being sort of vague with respect to a concrete argument. "A goat is not a pebble." Right-o. But what is a goat, and what is a pebble? Both are concepts that we've imposed on the world. The question is how language affects our grasp of reality; I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language. All that exists is stuff, I say. The order that we believe in is a construction. Cormac's take on this, how he says that a pebble *is* a goat, is, I believe, an exaggeration.
Indeed, as I was writing that sentence, I felt that “contradict” was too strong a word. Coming back here the next day, rereading sections of the text, I'm not sure where I had seen the conflict between it and the Michael Stevens part.
Re: Cormac and a pebble is not a goat. I used the expression only as an attack against paradoxes as ostensibly demonstrating the limits/ inconsistencies of thinking (as oppose to those of language) (not to say that thinking is absolutely consistent and has no limits). I suppose that what Cormac meant with "a thing is another thing" was clear to me by the “Stand for it.” (footnote #11). Or perhaps it was clear to me but I pretended it wasn't, my bad.
Your text was an intriguing read and I felt mostly of one mind with it, which is why I wonder if you really mean what you wrote in this last reply. “I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language.” Do you really think so? I could concede —though I'd still take some issue in it— if you said “artefacts of cognition/ perception.” Are there no things you perceive which are not talked about by you? Which cannot —yet— be talked about? It's hard to come up with examples for such things that elude language, as their very absence from discourse attests to their triviality or irrelevancy, but one came to my mind. I remember a clear afternoon when I was lying on the grass, staring at the sky, and noticing floaters. I explored the phenomenon by yawing and pitching my eyeballs. I had no idea what these were and as far as I knew, they were never described by anybody. I never heard or read anybody referring to them. Yet there they were. I also knew that it was not the first time I noticed them, and that I particularly remember that instance might have to do with what happened soon afterwards. In a book of his (I think it was Speak, Memory) which I coincidentally happened to read around that time, Nabokov referred to “mouches volantes”, giving me a name for that phenomenon.
Second, I'd say that to learn that something is “a goat” (one thing is another thing), you have to perceive it first. As you say, language bridges insular consciousnesses, but for us to develop it (or for one to learn it from the other), we two have to be able to perceive the phenomena we refer to. i.e. goats are artefacts of perception on which we stick an arbitrary label. A congenially blind person might learn that “bananas are yellow” with neither being able to experience the similarity between bananas, safety jackets, lemons and school buses nor being able to tell if a banana happens to be green or black.
Which is not to say that language does not affect our grasp of reality. What is it for, if it didn't?
Ah, okay. So: "I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language." No, I don't really think so. Sorry, it's hard enough to be clear about abstract things like this in a carefully written essay, let alone a comment... what I mean is, the existence of the *concept* of goat and pebble are artifacts of language. The goat and the pebble exist; but to be more precise about it, the reality of them does exist, but their coherence with respect to the concepts is shaky at best. From a rigorous objective ontological perspective, the "pebble" is just a bunch of atoms--reality is extremely messy and disorganized--and we just make sense of it by inventing the concept of pebble.
I admit I am working at a level that is outside of anything useful. The fact is that this organization of reality is really important and it's the only reason we're able to navigate the world. The only reason any of this matters is, I argue, that if you take it for granted without questioning it, you can lose touch with your experience of reality. That's what I'm getting at with the Buddhism stuff.
Your floaters example is a good one, because yes it's true that you experienced them without knowing their "name." I guess I would argue that if you weren't a human, if you weren't a linguistic being, you wouldn't have even thought to consider their nature or their properties or their name, because without language you wouldn't have any faculty for organizing your experience at all. The eye floaters would just be part of the undifferentiated flood of experience.
Which leads to your second point. I think the whole idea is that language changes how we perceive things. If you weren't a linguistic being, when you saw a goat you wouldn't think, "what is that?" expecting an answer like "goat." Like the eye floaters, you would have no manipulation of it as a thing. It would just be, it would fire up your amygdala or whatever, but you wouldn't be able to turn it over in your mind. And maybe this is why a blind person can think about the yellowness of a banana without having any true understanding of yellowness--they're still linguistic, so they can still manipulate concepts in this way.
Aha! Good, so we do disagree. To be clear, re: your first paragraph, I did understand "I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language" to be referring to the concepts rather than the reality of the goat and pebble.
You see concepts as artefacts of language. I see language as artefact of concepts.
How does your view square with the fact that we humans, born speechless, can learn a shared language? Don't I have to have the concept of a cat before I could learn to associate the sound "cat" with it?
"I guess I would argue that if you weren't a human, if you weren't a linguistic being, you wouldn't have even thought to consider their nature or their properties or their name, because without language you wouldn't have any faculty for organizing your experience at all. The eye floaters would just be part of the undifferentiated flood of experience." I disagree. First, I did not wonder about their name; their name came to me by chance. I did wonder about their nature, however. Your sentence seems to apply that the fact that we humans are both a linguistic being & being who wonder about the nature of things is not coincidental. This might be the case, I have not thought about it, but to me it seems like a new argument in this discussion (though it might have been an obvious implicit foundation for you. Was it?) But to touch on your grouping of "consideration of the nature of" and "consideration of their name", which is related to the "concepts being artefacts of language": I very strongly feel like thought, the consideration of the nature of things, is not contingent on language. There are many phenomena out there that I conceive and which I have no words for. I could describe them in language, but they do not have simple nouns, adjectives or verbs. Do you think that amounts to the same? I don't. Writings can be effortful; you know what it is you want to convey, but putting it into sentences takes time, requiring you to go through various combinations of words. If the concepts arose from language, wouldn't the sentences come more readily to mind? Also, if it's concepts which rose from language, I'd have imagined literature (in the most general sense of the word) being rather static. Don't new phenomena first arise in the world before being described in words by humans, rather than arise in literature before manifesting themselves in the world? We do not live in Tlön after all.
Your last paragraph also starkly disagrees with how I understand my thinking. It's true that language changes perception. It shifts our attention, for one thing. But my thinking per se is not lingual. It has no language. I simply see things in my mind's eye. (which reminds me this article https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example so I suppose that that last assertion is not uncontroversial)
Okay, interesting. Yes, I guess that is the question, isn't it? Did concepts come from language or did language come from concepts? It's very interesting either way.
"Don't I have to have the concept of a cat before I could learn to associate the sound 'cat' with it?" Yes, that must be true. The question is whether the *faculty* for language gave you the ability to apprehend concepts, even before you had mastery of language. Like I touch in the essay, there is a whole unconscious aspect of language, that must exist in the brain before the actual conscious language. Cormac makes the argument that the brain must have rearranged very significantly after the acquisition of language. As further evidence for this, you can look into the cognitive tradeoff hypothesis.
I can't be sure of this, obviously, but I suspect that non-human animals have no grasp of concepts. I think this is the main difference between animal consciousness and human consciousness. It is almost impossible to imagine an experience devoid of concepts (not completely impossible though, as I discuss in the essay). Again, we can't really know this and you can argue it either way. But it's at least conceivable that my dog has no concepts at all. I can teach her the word "Ball" and "Food", and she has associations with those words, but does that mean that she has grasped the concept of Ball and Food? Or does she just get excited when she hears them? Does her undifferentiated flood of experience just rise and fall, ebb and flow? We can't know, but it's conceivable to me.
As to your last paragraph, you're right, but you have to remember that our brains are completely different because we acquired language. Thinking isn't necessarily linguistic, but the two aren't as divorced as you're suggesting. You are thinking with a human mind. One of the only things we know about what separates the human brain from other animals' is that it is capable of language. It's structured completely differently because of this fact, and that affects the way you think, even when you aren't thinking linguistically.
"Your sentence seems to apply that the fact that we humans are both a linguistic being & being who wonder about the nature of things is not coincidental." Yes, I suppose that is what I am arguing. It's not a coincidence at all. The only reason you were capable of wondering about the eye floaters is because you have a linguistic mind; not merely a mind that manipulates linguistic objects, but a mind shaped by the domineering force that is language over eons.
"Don't new phenomena first arise in the world before being described in words by humans, rather than arise in literature before manifesting themselves in the world? We do not live in Tlön after all." Certainly. What I'm trying to get at is: what is the nature of those phenomena? It's not as well organized as we make it seem by writing about them. We have no way of understanding them other than the very neat understanding that is communicated via language. But it's not the way they really are. The way they really are is much more raw, much more messy, necessarily incomprehensible, disorganized, pre conceptual.
It was Dawson who made me publish Being patient with problems! I shared it with him when we were discussing a draft of his essay - so they are entwined.
This was a particularly delightful essay to read! Borges is one of my favourites, it feels like a fun game reading his works - his invented information mixed in with his never-ending knowledge, his ideas so thought-provoking. As I've mentioned once, I was captured by your substack first and foremost because of its name.
I can easily see the good influence of Henrik Karlsson on your output. Not particularly on style, which is very much yours, but certainly on the length and the dedication to more deeply explore each point that you raise. I really liked all the quotes and, since I have never read a Cormac McCarthy book, it gave me a new author to explore.
I’ve often wondered whether Borges, our first postmodernist, was just pulling our legs: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature."
I like how Borges used nonfictional forms in his fictions. “Tlön” is a memoir, even including Borges’ real-life friend, Bioy Cesares; “Pierre Menard” is a literary essay. If we didn’t know who Borges was and one of these was handed to us without the label of “fiction,” I wonder how far we would get before we realized we’d been had. But there’s almost always a wink at some point for the reader paying attention.
For example, in “Pierre Menard,” the discussion of Menard’s approaches to creating his own Quixote includes this passage: “The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” I think he’s definitely having a laugh there.
Your final section might be a good jumping-off point for a discussion of what great writing is. I’m not sure we can even define genre anymore, much less good writing. For example, what’s good poetry? Or even just what’s poetry? No one can agree. Wallace Stevens said poetry was “a pheasant disappearing in the brush.” That’s almost a circular definition, ie, I’ll know it when I see it.
Absolutely—when I first read Borges I was immediately struck by his "fictional essay" format. Pierre Menard is hilarious, but—as is typical of Borges—it's hilarious in a way that really makes you think. Like you say, it's a literary essay, and it's a profound one at that.
And yeah, I agree, I think genre is at best a superficially useful construct... its best use is giving bookstores a way to section books. I believe that any serious attempt at writing is necessarily genre-defying, because otherwise you are just yielding to genre. Cormac is a great example of this. He's clearly interested in the Western genre, but it's just one influence among many.
I'm in no way qualified to analyze poetry, but one thing I have been thinking about lately is that poetry is fundamentally something that is meant to be something that is read aloud on some level, which is decidedly not true for things we call prose, like novels (audiobooks notwithstanding... that's a whole other discussion) and essays. If an essay was primarily intended to be spoken and heard, we would call it a speech. I think you could make the case that poetry is written art that is (on some level) intended to be heard rather than or in addition to read.
Anyway, yes, no matter what, you will run into problems with categorization. I think this is a problem for basically anything, and that's sort of the point I'm trying to make in the essay—concepts, whether they are genres or forms or objects or people—just aren't ontologically sound at bottom, but they do allow us to make sense of these things and discuss them. For example, you can talk about the ways in which Cormac's books resemble the Western genre, or like the Ballards' resemble science fiction. Even though the concept of genre is inherently flawed, it is still useful for discussion.
Yes, for me a good poem has to sound good when read aloud. And it also has to have something memorable that brings you back to it, a line, a phrase, even just the sound of a certain word. That’s why I look at pop song lyrics as poetry, because a good song almost always has that, often in the chorus, something that’s memorable and makes you want to sing along.
Why is Taylor Swift a great songwriter? Because, like Dylan, etc., she can write poetically.
The rhetorical devices of speeches can sound quite poetic too, for example The Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s concision is also something I associate with poetry, whereas prose is wordy and turgid by comparison.
While it’s possible to appreciate poetry’s sonic devices reading silently to yourself, they’re even better when sounded out.
For example, if you listen to the late Louise Glück read her little poem here (press the audio button at top), you can hear how she honors the poem’s line breaks — I suspect she broke the lines like that for a reason connected to reading it aloud. And that last sentence is the memorable one.
Thanks Brian :) Thanks for sharing these talks! Super interesting. I just got to the part where he is talking about the origins of language, and wow, it's crazy how similar it is to "The Kekulé Problem."
Great read! McCarthy, Borges, the Ouroboros and more of what you deal with here has been an inspiration to my writing as well
I’ll check it out :)
Wow. So much in here.
From a Linguistic perspective, we are talking all around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and ideas around linguistic relativity. Does language influence our perception of reality or do we perceive reality and then reconstruct it using language?
From there, we could easily jump to the world-as-simulation concept... we do not experience reality. We collect sensory input via several receivers (eyes, ears, nose, fingertips) and assimilate those data into our own subjective construction of reality in real time using secret mechanisms in the human brain - how many of them conscious or subconscious, I really couldn't say. There is a name for this but I forget it now. The technical work done in Numenta Labs might lend a clue.
In other news, there isn't an earthly possession of mine I wouldn't happily hand over to witness a conversation between Borges and Cormac McCarthy...
Thank you for writing.
Would love to see you tackle Cortazar next...
I'd love to, is there a particular work you'd recommend?
Certainly, the “Blow-up” story might be a good place to start. My memory of reading this after seeing the movie was that you still have to read closely and carefully to catch that a murder has occurred.
Thinking about this movie and story recently reminded me of the “hybrid” nature of our art forms now, the internationalized aspect. Argentinian writer living in France —> famous Italian director —> changes setting from Paris to swinging London (let’s face it, cooler than Paris in 1966) —> adds American detective genre elements.
Well... Final del Juego has one of my favorite stories in it (which Henrik just unearthed... La Continuidad de Los Parques). And Rayuela is a bit of a mind fuck just as a novel.
Yeah, linguistic relativity is the question. I'm very partial to the idea.
"there isn't an earthly possession of mine I wouldn't happily hand over to witness a conversation between Borges and Cormac McCarthy..."
Well said. One of the reasons I got all worked up and I had to write this was because of the intellectual overlap I was noticing between the ideas in Cormac's novels and the ideas in Borges's stories, even though they are very different artists.
Thank YOU for writing :)
I had just read Henrik Karlsson's "Being patient with problems" before reading this and it was brought to my mind, not just because of the unconsciousness' power theme, but also for the citation of The Kid whose depthness recalled the Grothendieck quoted in Henrik's piece. Since he was credited at the end I suppose that for you it would be superfluous, but perhaps to the benefit of other readers:
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/being-patient-with-problems
Zen koans had come to my mind reading this piece before they were referred to explicitly. Nonetheless, the likened to koan Democritus quote seemed to me, well, rather static. At least when I think of koans, I think of those associated with Joshu. It's hard to get a "good example," so I'd just flip the book in random and pull a short one:
A monk asked, “The style of the master—what is it?”
Joshu said, “I don't hear well. You must speak up.”
The monk repeated his question.
Joshu said, “By your asking about my style, I know your style.”
(Radical Zen, The Sayings of Joshu, translated with a commentary by Yoel Hoffmann)
These are famously opaque, to the point that some people feel that any obscure bit of dialog would similarly qualify as a koan. It might be in some way true, but it misses the koans' documentary aspect. What makes them obscure is their —to borrow terms from your text above— non-stasis, their fluidity. Their meaning, that is, the meaning, or shall I say significance, of the exchanged words is derived from the context of the exchange, which is indeed missing. I interpret most as an effort of upmanship by the students against their master, Joshu, seeking to make him say something to which they could respond with "Aha! Got you." Therefore my effort of fathoming these koans rests not so much on the figuring out what particular words —nouns, verbs— signify, such as "style" above, but in figuring out who the persons are, what the situation is, what their assumptions are and so on.
I very much liked the bits about Heisenberg's arrival at the Uncertainty Principle!
"If you actually try to reason about identity, or even the ontology of simple objects, you find yourself twisted up in all sorts of logical paradoxes. Here too, reality refuses to be grasped."
I'm not sure whether here —and in the preceding and following paragraphs— you expound on Michael Stevens or express your own thoughts. It seems to contradict/ be contradicted by other sections of the text, and either way I rather disagree about this point, though it depends on what you mean above by "reason" (communicating, thinking, knowing?). I agree that concepts are useful but not exactly real, but what is real? I'm not sure anyone gets twisted thinking about one's —or Theseus' Ship's— identity. Paradoxes lay bare the limits of logic, that is, of language, not so much of thinking. Any sentence or lingual utterance casts a phenomenon into a limited conceptual framework, and the paradox does it in a way that frustrates the mind. But a thing is not another thing. The map is not the territory. A goat is not a pebble. You can count, divide, distribute goats using pebbles, but a goat is not hard, cannot skip on lakes and does not fit in your pocket (had you had any pockets, Mr. Caveman). The identity of a person or a ship is not bound to the particular atoms that compromise it (it seems to be a metaphor; a chair is the material formed into a chair form, material consists of atoms, therefore the atoms are the chair). It's a false presumption that the articulation of the paradox leads one to assume, a kind of an anchoring (ha) effect. Language —and paradoxes and other detached, non-contextualized fragments thereof in particular— have an air of expressing an absolute truth, perhaps indeed lay claim to it, but of course —as your essay expresses— they cannot do it. They only reflect an aspect of the real, like the pebbles that can capture the number or the spatial relationship of goats but not many other aspects of goats. Like with the koans, thinking beyond the words, contextualizing in, helps to clarify them. Who is asking about the identity of the ship? My friend who tries to give me a hard time? The insurance company? The taxman? An easier one is Zeno's. They say that Achilles must run half the distance first, but nobody in his right mind doubt that he will reach the tortoise.
Thanks for reading Mark, and thanks for sharing Henrik's post. It's great and I hope people read it, and another thing that makes it particularly interesting is that Grothendieck and this way of problem solving is actually discussed quite a bit in Stella Maris!
You are probably right that the comparison to Koans there is a little bit of a stretch. What I meant was mostly that Heraclitus's philosophy only survives in fragments that give it a Koan-like feel, and they also have the initial appearance of absurdity like the most famous Koans. Anyways, love your commentary on the Koans here, and it helps support the point that the power of language is in its fluidity, not the way it maps reality.
Your challenge is fair. I am mostly summarizing Michael Stevens but I happen to agree with the thinking. To be honest, I don't see how it contradicts the rest of the text, although I acknowledge I am being sort of vague with respect to a concrete argument. "A goat is not a pebble." Right-o. But what is a goat, and what is a pebble? Both are concepts that we've imposed on the world. The question is how language affects our grasp of reality; I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language. All that exists is stuff, I say. The order that we believe in is a construction. Cormac's take on this, how he says that a pebble *is* a goat, is, I believe, an exaggeration.
Thank you for writing!
Indeed, as I was writing that sentence, I felt that “contradict” was too strong a word. Coming back here the next day, rereading sections of the text, I'm not sure where I had seen the conflict between it and the Michael Stevens part.
Re: Cormac and a pebble is not a goat. I used the expression only as an attack against paradoxes as ostensibly demonstrating the limits/ inconsistencies of thinking (as oppose to those of language) (not to say that thinking is absolutely consistent and has no limits). I suppose that what Cormac meant with "a thing is another thing" was clear to me by the “Stand for it.” (footnote #11). Or perhaps it was clear to me but I pretended it wasn't, my bad.
Your text was an intriguing read and I felt mostly of one mind with it, which is why I wonder if you really mean what you wrote in this last reply. “I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language.” Do you really think so? I could concede —though I'd still take some issue in it— if you said “artefacts of cognition/ perception.” Are there no things you perceive which are not talked about by you? Which cannot —yet— be talked about? It's hard to come up with examples for such things that elude language, as their very absence from discourse attests to their triviality or irrelevancy, but one came to my mind. I remember a clear afternoon when I was lying on the grass, staring at the sky, and noticing floaters. I explored the phenomenon by yawing and pitching my eyeballs. I had no idea what these were and as far as I knew, they were never described by anybody. I never heard or read anybody referring to them. Yet there they were. I also knew that it was not the first time I noticed them, and that I particularly remember that instance might have to do with what happened soon afterwards. In a book of his (I think it was Speak, Memory) which I coincidentally happened to read around that time, Nabokov referred to “mouches volantes”, giving me a name for that phenomenon.
Second, I'd say that to learn that something is “a goat” (one thing is another thing), you have to perceive it first. As you say, language bridges insular consciousnesses, but for us to develop it (or for one to learn it from the other), we two have to be able to perceive the phenomena we refer to. i.e. goats are artefacts of perception on which we stick an arbitrary label. A congenially blind person might learn that “bananas are yellow” with neither being able to experience the similarity between bananas, safety jackets, lemons and school buses nor being able to tell if a banana happens to be green or black.
Which is not to say that language does not affect our grasp of reality. What is it for, if it didn't?
Ah, okay. So: "I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language." No, I don't really think so. Sorry, it's hard enough to be clear about abstract things like this in a carefully written essay, let alone a comment... what I mean is, the existence of the *concept* of goat and pebble are artifacts of language. The goat and the pebble exist; but to be more precise about it, the reality of them does exist, but their coherence with respect to the concepts is shaky at best. From a rigorous objective ontological perspective, the "pebble" is just a bunch of atoms--reality is extremely messy and disorganized--and we just make sense of it by inventing the concept of pebble.
I admit I am working at a level that is outside of anything useful. The fact is that this organization of reality is really important and it's the only reason we're able to navigate the world. The only reason any of this matters is, I argue, that if you take it for granted without questioning it, you can lose touch with your experience of reality. That's what I'm getting at with the Buddhism stuff.
Your floaters example is a good one, because yes it's true that you experienced them without knowing their "name." I guess I would argue that if you weren't a human, if you weren't a linguistic being, you wouldn't have even thought to consider their nature or their properties or their name, because without language you wouldn't have any faculty for organizing your experience at all. The eye floaters would just be part of the undifferentiated flood of experience.
Which leads to your second point. I think the whole idea is that language changes how we perceive things. If you weren't a linguistic being, when you saw a goat you wouldn't think, "what is that?" expecting an answer like "goat." Like the eye floaters, you would have no manipulation of it as a thing. It would just be, it would fire up your amygdala or whatever, but you wouldn't be able to turn it over in your mind. And maybe this is why a blind person can think about the yellowness of a banana without having any true understanding of yellowness--they're still linguistic, so they can still manipulate concepts in this way.
Aha! Good, so we do disagree. To be clear, re: your first paragraph, I did understand "I am trying to suggest that the existence of the goat and the pebble are artifacts of language" to be referring to the concepts rather than the reality of the goat and pebble.
You see concepts as artefacts of language. I see language as artefact of concepts.
How does your view square with the fact that we humans, born speechless, can learn a shared language? Don't I have to have the concept of a cat before I could learn to associate the sound "cat" with it?
"I guess I would argue that if you weren't a human, if you weren't a linguistic being, you wouldn't have even thought to consider their nature or their properties or their name, because without language you wouldn't have any faculty for organizing your experience at all. The eye floaters would just be part of the undifferentiated flood of experience." I disagree. First, I did not wonder about their name; their name came to me by chance. I did wonder about their nature, however. Your sentence seems to apply that the fact that we humans are both a linguistic being & being who wonder about the nature of things is not coincidental. This might be the case, I have not thought about it, but to me it seems like a new argument in this discussion (though it might have been an obvious implicit foundation for you. Was it?) But to touch on your grouping of "consideration of the nature of" and "consideration of their name", which is related to the "concepts being artefacts of language": I very strongly feel like thought, the consideration of the nature of things, is not contingent on language. There are many phenomena out there that I conceive and which I have no words for. I could describe them in language, but they do not have simple nouns, adjectives or verbs. Do you think that amounts to the same? I don't. Writings can be effortful; you know what it is you want to convey, but putting it into sentences takes time, requiring you to go through various combinations of words. If the concepts arose from language, wouldn't the sentences come more readily to mind? Also, if it's concepts which rose from language, I'd have imagined literature (in the most general sense of the word) being rather static. Don't new phenomena first arise in the world before being described in words by humans, rather than arise in literature before manifesting themselves in the world? We do not live in Tlön after all.
Your last paragraph also starkly disagrees with how I understand my thinking. It's true that language changes perception. It shifts our attention, for one thing. But my thinking per se is not lingual. It has no language. I simply see things in my mind's eye. (which reminds me this article https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example so I suppose that that last assertion is not uncontroversial)
Okay, interesting. Yes, I guess that is the question, isn't it? Did concepts come from language or did language come from concepts? It's very interesting either way.
"Don't I have to have the concept of a cat before I could learn to associate the sound 'cat' with it?" Yes, that must be true. The question is whether the *faculty* for language gave you the ability to apprehend concepts, even before you had mastery of language. Like I touch in the essay, there is a whole unconscious aspect of language, that must exist in the brain before the actual conscious language. Cormac makes the argument that the brain must have rearranged very significantly after the acquisition of language. As further evidence for this, you can look into the cognitive tradeoff hypothesis.
I can't be sure of this, obviously, but I suspect that non-human animals have no grasp of concepts. I think this is the main difference between animal consciousness and human consciousness. It is almost impossible to imagine an experience devoid of concepts (not completely impossible though, as I discuss in the essay). Again, we can't really know this and you can argue it either way. But it's at least conceivable that my dog has no concepts at all. I can teach her the word "Ball" and "Food", and she has associations with those words, but does that mean that she has grasped the concept of Ball and Food? Or does she just get excited when she hears them? Does her undifferentiated flood of experience just rise and fall, ebb and flow? We can't know, but it's conceivable to me.
As to your last paragraph, you're right, but you have to remember that our brains are completely different because we acquired language. Thinking isn't necessarily linguistic, but the two aren't as divorced as you're suggesting. You are thinking with a human mind. One of the only things we know about what separates the human brain from other animals' is that it is capable of language. It's structured completely differently because of this fact, and that affects the way you think, even when you aren't thinking linguistically.
"Your sentence seems to apply that the fact that we humans are both a linguistic being & being who wonder about the nature of things is not coincidental." Yes, I suppose that is what I am arguing. It's not a coincidence at all. The only reason you were capable of wondering about the eye floaters is because you have a linguistic mind; not merely a mind that manipulates linguistic objects, but a mind shaped by the domineering force that is language over eons.
"Don't new phenomena first arise in the world before being described in words by humans, rather than arise in literature before manifesting themselves in the world? We do not live in Tlön after all." Certainly. What I'm trying to get at is: what is the nature of those phenomena? It's not as well organized as we make it seem by writing about them. We have no way of understanding them other than the very neat understanding that is communicated via language. But it's not the way they really are. The way they really are is much more raw, much more messy, necessarily incomprehensible, disorganized, pre conceptual.
It was Dawson who made me publish Being patient with problems! I shared it with him when we were discussing a draft of his essay - so they are entwined.
Aha!
This was a particularly delightful essay to read! Borges is one of my favourites, it feels like a fun game reading his works - his invented information mixed in with his never-ending knowledge, his ideas so thought-provoking. As I've mentioned once, I was captured by your substack first and foremost because of its name.
I can easily see the good influence of Henrik Karlsson on your output. Not particularly on style, which is very much yours, but certainly on the length and the dedication to more deeply explore each point that you raise. I really liked all the quotes and, since I have never read a Cormac McCarthy book, it gave me a new author to explore.
Thanks so much. It is really nice to hear that a unique voice comes through. Yeah, definitely give Cormac a chance!
I’ve often wondered whether Borges, our first postmodernist, was just pulling our legs: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature."
Ha! Yeah, great point.
I like how Borges used nonfictional forms in his fictions. “Tlön” is a memoir, even including Borges’ real-life friend, Bioy Cesares; “Pierre Menard” is a literary essay. If we didn’t know who Borges was and one of these was handed to us without the label of “fiction,” I wonder how far we would get before we realized we’d been had. But there’s almost always a wink at some point for the reader paying attention.
For example, in “Pierre Menard,” the discussion of Menard’s approaches to creating his own Quixote includes this passage: “The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” I think he’s definitely having a laugh there.
Your final section might be a good jumping-off point for a discussion of what great writing is. I’m not sure we can even define genre anymore, much less good writing. For example, what’s good poetry? Or even just what’s poetry? No one can agree. Wallace Stevens said poetry was “a pheasant disappearing in the brush.” That’s almost a circular definition, ie, I’ll know it when I see it.
Absolutely—when I first read Borges I was immediately struck by his "fictional essay" format. Pierre Menard is hilarious, but—as is typical of Borges—it's hilarious in a way that really makes you think. Like you say, it's a literary essay, and it's a profound one at that.
And yeah, I agree, I think genre is at best a superficially useful construct... its best use is giving bookstores a way to section books. I believe that any serious attempt at writing is necessarily genre-defying, because otherwise you are just yielding to genre. Cormac is a great example of this. He's clearly interested in the Western genre, but it's just one influence among many.
I'm in no way qualified to analyze poetry, but one thing I have been thinking about lately is that poetry is fundamentally something that is meant to be something that is read aloud on some level, which is decidedly not true for things we call prose, like novels (audiobooks notwithstanding... that's a whole other discussion) and essays. If an essay was primarily intended to be spoken and heard, we would call it a speech. I think you could make the case that poetry is written art that is (on some level) intended to be heard rather than or in addition to read.
Anyway, yes, no matter what, you will run into problems with categorization. I think this is a problem for basically anything, and that's sort of the point I'm trying to make in the essay—concepts, whether they are genres or forms or objects or people—just aren't ontologically sound at bottom, but they do allow us to make sense of these things and discuss them. For example, you can talk about the ways in which Cormac's books resemble the Western genre, or like the Ballards' resemble science fiction. Even though the concept of genre is inherently flawed, it is still useful for discussion.
Yes, for me a good poem has to sound good when read aloud. And it also has to have something memorable that brings you back to it, a line, a phrase, even just the sound of a certain word. That’s why I look at pop song lyrics as poetry, because a good song almost always has that, often in the chorus, something that’s memorable and makes you want to sing along.
Why is Taylor Swift a great songwriter? Because, like Dylan, etc., she can write poetically.
The rhetorical devices of speeches can sound quite poetic too, for example The Gettysburg Address. Lincoln’s concision is also something I associate with poetry, whereas prose is wordy and turgid by comparison.
While it’s possible to appreciate poetry’s sonic devices reading silently to yourself, they’re even better when sounded out.
For example, if you listen to the late Louise Glück read her little poem here (press the audio button at top), you can hear how she honors the poem’s line breaks — I suspect she broke the lines like that for a reason connected to reading it aloud. And that last sentence is the memorable one.
https://poets.org/poem/red-poppy-0
Incredibly impressed with this. So diaphanous, wondrous and moving. Never stop.
Thank you :)
Thanks Brian :) Thanks for sharing these talks! Super interesting. I just got to the part where he is talking about the origins of language, and wow, it's crazy how similar it is to "The Kekulé Problem."