Language As A Reminder Of My Limits

In my first post I mentioned that, prior to starting theunconventionalist, I had all but sworn off the discipline of regular writing because I thought I had too much to say - and too much of it was junk. When faced with either the monumental task of shifting through the chaff for the wheat or the unattainable task of churning out written records of my thoughts faster than my brain could churn out junk I chose the written mute. But there was another, more pertinent, reason I was wary of writing - one more rooted in fear than sloth.

I've loved words as far back as I can remember. I would spend hours pouring through the dictionary when I was younger, and I had a goal of learning one new word every day - yes, I was that kid. What always fascinated me was how there seemed to be a word for everything, I remember reflecting on the fact that if I knew and used every word in the Oxford English dictionary I would be able to cut down the number of words I spoke by at least 90%. But the attraction was purely about efficiency - there is something deeply comforting, almost magical, when you find a word the describes an idea you've had but couldn't express. It means that somebody else, most likely a very very long time ago, undoubtedly in a land far far away, had wrestled with the same idea. Indeed, it means that enough people have shared the idea to warrant and propagate a universal term for it. In this light, language is more than an efficient means of communication, it is a reminder of our shared experience, our shared humanity. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it then, but in some way, as I sat in the big brown sofa of our living room, worn, black and yellow Oxford English dictionary in hand, swinging feet still to short to reach the ground, I felt transported from the confines my small world of home and school into the much larger common stream of the human story. This was particularly appreciated because school life wasn't always the most pleasant for the kid who read a dictionary for fun.

But most of the time, we don't encounter words in that way (having ideas and then discovering words to describe them). Instead language is taught to us and accompanying ideas are attached to these words. One of the best examples I've heard of this is with role of articles on perception in languages. Below is a quote from a NY Times Article where the author describes the phenomenon:

In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

The point is that language doesn't just describe ideas, it defines them. Thus, even though for means of translation the German and Spanish words for bridge are adequate, the holistic idea to which a German speaker is referring is not the same as that of a Spanish speaker simply because of the language they express themselves in. The idea of a bridge, not its dimensions or features but its very essence, has been changed.

Bridges, I concede, are little more than a interesting anecdote. The power of language to manipulate meaning becomes infinitely more salient as we consider issues of greater weight. For me, one such issue is self-perception or self-definition. One of my reasons for finally caving in to the urge to start this blog was a desire to better understand myself and how I see the world, with the hope that putting them down in ink, or bytes as is the case, would bring clarity. However putting words to ideas carries the risk of over simplification and manipulation. The words I choose will not just influence what you understand by what I say, but what I do. And I have a very real fear that in the process, because of a paucity in either my lexicon, or the English vocabulary, the final product will be a but a shadow of who I am - with subtleties ignored and essences corrupted. I won't fully understand.

Of course, while the non-linear, assortment of ideas that make up our thoughts are less restricted than the written word, they are only marginally so - we think, as well as speak, in language. Therein lies the paradox of language, it at once illuminates and darkens, frees and limits. And so we arrive at that which we knew all along, the crossroads at which all paths of intellectual inquiry must meet on their way to the truth. To go further we must concede, in this life at least, that we will never be omniscient, never fully understand. My decision to go ahead with this blog was the realization that any attempt to escape this truth was foolish hubris.

My solace in this realization is the same one I found all those years ago as I turned the browned pages of my Oxford English dictionary. As we concede that there are insurmountable limitations in our search for truth we are in the company of a multitude of witness made up of women and men of antiquity, sages who discovered the same thing. I am not alone. Many have wisely wrestled through the same things, and my favorites found it a call to humility rather than despondency in the continued search for truth.
Socrates said:

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

In his record of the trial that would lead to Socrates' death, Plato gives us some insight into why meekness rather than apathy was the Socratic approach to our overwhelming incapacity to grasp the whole truth:

I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing... as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. And so I go on my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god - Socrates

For Socrates, our inability to fully understand isn't allowed to soil the truth for which we ware searching. He, like many who had come before and would come after him, insisted on the imperfection of the traveler not the goal - an untarnished, immaculate, divine goal; more than worth the weary stumbling of those who seek it. Over 450 years later, Saint Paul would further this Socratic thesis, in a way I find even more compelling:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known - St. Paul

For him, the opacity of the human experience (and the clarity we universally, relentlessly seek) point not just to limited humanity but the unlimited divine, and the promise that there will come a time when that desire to truly know (to finally "grow up") will be fulfilled. For St. Paul, knowing the truth and being known by the Truth were intimately connected because the truth was more than a set of ideas, it was a being, a personality, God. Even as he acknowledged his inability to fully embrace the truth, he saw the Truth embracing him. And that embrace was a promise, that one day he too would grasp all of Truth. He describes that elaborate, eternal dance as love (cf. 1 Cor 13) - and I love that, but that's for some other paraphrase.

I will never fully know but it is worth it nay even tantamount that I keep searching because, to paraphrase Socrates (he, after all, had the idea first!), that is the only life worth living (cf. Apology 3a).